The actor Robin Williams compared to “a shark who knows where the blood is”
No actor carries a 100% success rate when it comes to choosing the right roles at the perfect moment in their career to bring them up to the next level, except maybe the one star Robin Williams described as having an almost predatory gift for doing just that.
He would know, with the actor and comedian already an established name on the stand-up circuit and on the small screen when he took his first major gig headlining a movie in Popeye. It didn’t quite go to plan, though, and it was a while before Williams landed the part that would serve as his Hollywood breakthrough.
It wasn’t until the release of Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987 that it felt as though Williams had finally arrived as a cinematic power player, with the razor-sharp satirical war comedy recouping its budget nearly ten times over and earning him his first Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Actor’ category.
The film was Williams’ ninth feature credit in total, so it wasn’t a rapid ascent. However, a peer and contemporary who also evolved from a riotous stand-up comedian into an A-list fixture managed to eclipse that level of stardom with the greatest of ease by developing an innate gift for sensing which projects carried the most potential for success.
During an interview with Rolling Stone not long after Good Morning, Vietnam had snaffled him a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ and forced the rest of the industry to sit up and take notice of a performer who was equally adept at making people laugh as he was plumbing the emotional depths, Williams couldn’t help but be enthralled by the trajectory of Eddie Murphy.
“He’s instinctual, like a shark he knows where the blood is,” he marvelled. “He’s only made a few mistakes. He knows what his area is and what he does. That’s why he’s on top of the script food chain.” Looking at where Murphy was when Williams made those comments in 1988, he’s got a point.
His very first movie reinvented the buddy cop wheel with 48 Hrs, his second was the smash hit Trading Places, and his fourth was Beverly Hills Cop, the highest-grossing film of 1984 in the United States. The Golden Child was another smash hit, Beverly Hills Cop II came within a whisker of $300million in ticket sales, Eddie Murphy Raw was the top-earning stand-up film in history, and Coming to America was yet another unqualified success.
Remember, all of those aforementioned credits comprised seven of the first eight theatrical releases Murphy had ever lent his name to, so it’s completely understandable that Williams would be amazed by the consistency he’d displayed throughout his brief career at the time.
