The 12 Best Robin Williams Performances
1984 was a make or break year for Williams. He had finished a wildly successful stint on an immensely popular sitcom and was one of the hottest stand-up comics going, but his attempts to break into film had been somewhat mixed. His performance in "The World According to Garp" had been better received than the film itself and though he was actually quite good in Robert Altman’s "Popeye," the movie itself was a bizarre failure. Paul Mazursky’s "Moscow on the Hudson" has perhaps not aged terribly well, with its Cold War politics and its depiction of the immigrant experience in NYC, but Williams delivers a crushing sadness to the role that showed that he was more than just a manic comedian.
After a few more stumbles, this would be the movie that would garner Williams his first Oscar nomination and begin a hot streak that would last for the next half decade. Partially based on the true story of Vietnam veteran disc jockey Adrian Cronauer, "Good Morning, Vietnam" was Barry Levinson's perfect vehicle for Williams, allowing him to display his livewire comic chops, gift for impressions, and deep wells of pathos.
For better or worse, this will probably be the movie in Williams’s filmography that will be remembered most fondly. Twenty-five years of replays and uncredited remakes have left us all a bit weary of the “carpe diem” nonsense, but it’s hard to argue that Williams didn’t wonderfully embody the inspirational teacher in "Dead Poets Society." That the movie also touches on suicide is also a sad harbinger.
Even in his prior dramatic roles, Robin Williams had always been given a chance to display his comedic chops. His DJ sequences and front-of-the-class monologues were basically stand-up performances woven relatively well into the narrative. With "Awakenings," Williams gave his first fully restrained role as a doctor watching with joy and then horror as his patients improve, only to deteriorate again. As with all of director Penny Marshall’s films, the sentimentality in this one is occasionally overwhelming, but with this (true to life) subject matter it’s hard not to shed a tear.
Kenneth Branagh’s film noir homage is not without its flaws (casting its director as a hard-boiled detective foremost among them), but "Dead Again" is also a wonderfully twisty thriller with a supernatural bent and some great supporting performances, including from Williams. Trading off his cuddly persona, Wiliams plays the bitter and cynical owner of a convenience store who leads Branagh down the path toward reincarnation. Williams would play more jerks and out-and-out villians later in his career, but this was the first hint he could display a dark side.
Even before Williams's tragic death, there was a solid argument to be made that "The Fisher King" is his best movie. In light of the struggles with mental illness that would ultimately end the actor’s life, it becomes an even more powerful film. As a college professor who loses touch with reality following the murder of his wife, Williams was able to display both his manic genius and his profound sadness. And at the end the Holy Grail was on the Upper West Side after all.
If "The Fisher King" was the marriage of the best acting of Williams's career with the best script he would work with, then "Aladdin" is probably the most perfect distillation of Williams's comedic performance. Freed of his physical body and given license to do almost whatever he wanted (provided he could say it in a Disney movie), Williams is a whirling dervish of humor, darting at random between a million personalities. The movie wouldn’t have existed without him. With him, it became one of the most successful films in Disney history.
By the mid-90s the struggle for gay rights was beginning to take center stage in the American media. Two decades later, it’s easy to forget that it was a bold decision for director Mike Nichols and Williams (and the then still-closeted Nathan Lane) to remake this French sex farce. Nichols had some history at the front of the sexual revolution with films like "The Graduate" and "Carnal Knowledge," and he hit another home run with "The Birdcage." Though Williams is sometimes campy in the role, that doesn’t seem terribly out of place for a Miami nightclub owner. Lane, Hank Azaria, and Gene Hackman round out a cast at the top of its game.
Williams had always expressed a great love for Shakespeare, even in his stand-up comedy days, so it was not particularly surprising that he was reunited with Branagh for a role in "Hamlet," the Bard’s most celebrated play. Though the full-text adaptation is unwieldy and the Napoleonic setting doesn’t always work, the film is full of wonderful performances, including Williams as the obsequious Osric (and a very good Billy Crystal as the Gravedigger).
Another film that has been tarnished somewhat by its legacy (unleashing Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on the world and a million bad Boston accents), it’s easy to forget that at its heart, this is a perfectly good coming-of-age film. Robin Williams finally landed an Oscar for his role as therapist for a troubled young man who harbors a tragic past himself. In hindsight, it’s striking how many of Williams’s best roles were tinged with such sadness.
Though Robin Williams did make many high-quality and beloved films, many of the films he made in the 90s were less well received. Following criticism that he had become too saccharine, the comedian took on two profoundly dark performances in the same year. Though Christopher Nolan’s "Insomnia" is probably the better film, "One Hour Photo" is the better performance, with Williams aging himself up to become the kindly old man who’s just a little too obsessed with a seemingly idyllic local family.
There is bitter irony in the fact that one of Williams’s last great performances again features a suicide so prominently. When Robin Williams's character finds his teenage son dead in a particularly humiliating accidental fashion, he reframes the death to look like a suicide, but is then overwhelmed by the response from his deceased son’s peers. His son, and by extention, his character, become local heroes despite the fact that it is all built on lies.