Ron Howard’s unforgettable first encounter with Robin Williams: “I’ll always be grateful that I got to witness it”
Ron Howard has worked with plenty of A-list actors throughout his career, from Tom Hanks and Amy Adams to John Wayne and Cate Blanchett. He’s been a working member of the Hollywood inner circle since he was a toddler, but he shows no signs of slowing down or falling out of love with filmmaking. He’s been a sitcom star, a director, and a producer. He’s contributed to flops and won a couple of Oscars. He’s a creature of the film industry through and through, so you’d think he’d be the last person to get starstruck.
However, there was an exception. When Howard was still starring in the television show Happy Days in the 1970s, he had the chance to meet Robin Williams. At the time, the comedian had yet to transition into a movie star. He was still a jobbing stand-up, and although he had started to gain the attention of some industry higher-ups, he had yet to break through to the mainstream. When he came to Happy Days as a guest star, he was playing an alien named Mork, and his performance was so wildly successful that ABC created the spinoff series Mork and Mindy just for him.
Howard described his first meeting with Williams in a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ thread. He explained that the cast usually rehearsed a new episode from Monday to Thursday before filming it in front of an audience on Friday. Williams didn’t show up Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, which sent an ominous feeling through the cast. “Everybody was very nervous,” he recalled. “They even talked about maybe shutting the show down that week, which would have been very expensive.”
Then, the casting director showed up on stage with Williams, who was wearing suspenders, a beret, and a striped black and white shirt. “He immediately took over,” Howard remembered, “But in the most playful way, you wouldn’t believe it. Henry Winkler [who played Fonzie in the show] looked at me after this five-minute torrent of unbelievable hilarious improvs… we just never had never seen a burst of genius quite like that.”
In the coming years, Williams’ explosive talent for ad-libbing and physical comedy would become the stuff of legend, but in 1978, it was a discovery. The episode was a turning point in his career, and a lucky one at that. Garry Marshall, who had created Happy Days, had wanted a different actor to play Mork, but the initial script had been so terrible that he quit. Williams was a wild card, but as soon as he auditioned for the part, he was a shoo-in. For him, the quality of the script held no bearing on the outcome of his performance because he was just going to improvise everything anyway.
For Howard, no matter how jarring it might have been to act opposite a co-star who had no intention of following the script, seeing Williams perform that day was a privilege. “Robin is so missed for that mind, that heart, and that talent,” he said, “But it was all there on that day, and I’ll always be grateful that I got to witness it.”
