Lord Attenborough

Lord Attenborough was a pillar of British cinema whose career spanned six decades and who, as a director, won eight Oscars for his sweeping biopic of Gandhi

Lord Attenborough, the actor and director who has died aged 90, was one of the pillars of British cinema, originally as an actor and subsequently as an Oscar-winning director; his 1982 biopic, Gandhi, won best film of the year in the annual Academy Awards, Attenborough himself being named best director and Ben Kingsley best actor in the title role.

Having first made his name on screen in his student days, playing a Navy stoker, terrified under fire, in the war film In Which We Serve (1942), Richard Attenborough was just 24 years old at the time of filming in his standout role as Pinkie, the adolescent gangster of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. It was a part he had already played briefly on the stage, and in the cinema, close-ups allowed him to deepen the performance to chilling effect. “The face, with its cod eyes and tight lips, is both brutal and angelic”, wrote Steve Chibnall in his 2005 British Film Guide, and in the course of the film’s taut 90 minutes Attenborough applied himself to the whole gamut of Pinkie’s warped emotional range, from dead-eyed brutality to sweating, gaping fear.

^{Attenborough as Pinkie in 'Brighton Rock'} 

In later years his own warmth of personality came to the fore, and with Jurassic Park (1993) he endeared himself to whole new generation of fans, playing an avuncular professor whose naiviety almost proves fatal when things go awry at his dinosaur-filled island theme park.

But it was Gandhi that was the apex of Richard Attenborough’s career and displayed a facility, unsuspected in his acting days, for handling large casts and epic, sweeping narratives. The film had a long and difficult gestation. As he later recalled in in a book, In Search of Gandhi (1982) his obsession with the leader of India’s non-violent independence movement had begun in 1962 when he sketched out plans for the film and approached Lord Mountbatten, who effected an introduction to Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, and Indira Gandhi, his daughter, both of whom approved of the project. However early preparations collapsed when Nehru died. It would be another 18 years before shooting began, with a $22 million budget made possible thanks to promptings by Mrs Gandhi, who persuaded India’s National Film Development Corporation to stump up a third if western backers would guarantee the rest.

The premiere in New Delhi in 1982, followed within a week by openings in London and America, took place almost exactly two years after the start of production. It met with an almost universally favourable, even fulsome, press for its hugely impressive cinematography and Attenborough’s grasp of spectacle — shown in his brilliant direction of such historic turning points as the Amritsar massacre of 1919. It won eight Oscars, more than any other British film had done up until that time.

^{Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley with their Oscars in 1983} 

Richard Attenborough also had a wide range of interests outside the film industry, and at various times was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Pro-Chancellor of Sussex University, a governor of the National Film School and a director (1969-82) of Chelsea Football Club, of which he was later made life vice-president.

His mother had been a radical and was active in the Labour Party, but Richard’s personal politics played little conspicuous part in his movies beyond a broad commitment to humane subjects and noble themes. He was a natural choice as the first practising film-maker to be appointed chairman of the British Film Institute, a post he held from 1982 to 1992. It set a pattern later followed by his successors, who were also film-makers – Alan Parker and Anthony Minghella.

Richard Samuel Attenborough was born in Cambridge on August 29 1923, the eldest of three sons of Frederick Levi Attenborough, then a don at Emmanuel College and author of a textbook on Anglo-Saxon law. Richard’s younger brother, David, became famous in his own right for his groundbreaking television documentaries on wildlife.

The family grew up in a crusading atmosphere. Mrs Attenborough was a founder member of the Marriage Guidance Council and the bookshelves were heavy with weighty tomes published by the Left Book Club. Political convictions were accompanied by good works. During and after the war, the Attenboroughs took in two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, who remained with them for seven years.

When Richard was nine, the family moved to Leicester, where his father had become head of the University. Richard attended Wyggeston Grammar School, but was the least academic of the Attenborough boys, always favouring play-acting to erudition. At the age of 12, he hired a venue in Leicester to stage a programme of sketches, harmonica solos and comic songs. His mother became president of the Leicester Little Theatre and was able to steer him in the direction of small parts. In 1941 he successfully auditioned for RADA. There he met another aspiring actress, Sheila Sim, whom he later married.

While still a student, he was cast in his first film, In Which We Serve (1942), Noel Coward’s patriotic study of how the war affected the crew of a Royal Navy destroyer. Though Coward himself played the lead, it was Attenborough’s contribution that the audience remembered. As the young stoker who attempts to overcome his abject terror as his ship comes under attack, he provided a character with whom filmgoers everywhere could identify.

Attenborough himself served in the war in the RAF, which he joined in 1943, and was posted to the RAF Film Unit, where he acted in Journey Together (1945) as a trainee pilot shot down over the North Sea. The film was part of the war effort and designed to cement the special relationship with America, represented in the film by Edward G Robinson, who waived his fee for playing a flying instructor.

In 1948, the same year as Brighton Rock, he played another murderer (this time awaiting execution) in London Belongs to Me, and – in the most eccentric role he was ever asked to play – appeared in The Guinea Pig, as a 15-year-old working-class boy sent to a public school as part of the post-war Labour government’s educational experiments. At this time he acted for the theatre as well as the cinema – notably in a two-year attachment as the detective in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1952) at the start of its record-breaking run. His wife Sheila was also in the cast.

^{Attenborough with his wife Sheila} 

In the cinema, Attenborough became typecast. He was first choice for roles in uniform in such films as Morning Departure (1950), The Gift Horse (1952) and Dunkirk (1958), or as youthful offenders, as in Boys in Brown (1950) and Eight o’clock Walk (1954).

Deeply frustrated, he contacted an old friend, Bryan Forbes, whose career had also stalled, and in 1959 they established their own company, Beaver Films, to seek out more rewarding material. Their first production, The Angry Silence (1960), was made for less than £100,000 – a small sum, even then, by film industry standards. Forbes wrote the script, Attenborough played the lead and the subject was a hot potato in those days – the power of trades unions and their ability to ostracise and punish fellow workers who refuse to join a wildcat strike.

None of the Beaver films that followed had quite the same impact, but all were challenging. The League of Gentlemen (1960), in which Attenborough acted, was a caper movie with sardonic undertones. In Whistle Down the Wind (1961), which Attenborough produced and Forbes directed, Alan Bates as a bearded killer on the run is mistaken by a gullible little girl (Hayley Mills) for the risen Christ.

Forbes also directed the last two Beaver pictures: The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), in which Attenborough played the husband of a fake spiritualist (Kim Stanley) who inveigles him into a scam involving the kidnapping of a rich man’s daughter and the apparently miraculous ability to reveal the child’s whereabouts. Distributors, however, had no confidence in the picture, according it only a patchy release and forcing Beaver to wind up.

By this time, Attenborough had conceived the idea for Gandhi, but his failure to find backing for the project forced him, for the time being, to concentrate on acting. He decided to accept offers from Hollywood. Flight of the Phoenix (1966), The Sand Pebbles (1967) and Dr Dolittle (also 1967) were all disappointing. But 10 Rillington Place (1970), directed by Richard Fleischer, was a remarkable return to form. Attenborough played the mass murderer John Christie, for whose crimes Timothy Evans was wrongly executed. A miscarriage of justice that eventually contributed to the abolition in Britain of capital punishment, it provided Attenborough with his most memorable role since Brighton Rock.

Attenborough had another stroke of luck when John Mills asked him in 1969 to direct a film version of Joan Littlewood’s Stratford East production of Oh! What a Lovely War. This was the practical experience Attenborough would need if he was ever to get his Gandhi film off the ground. But it required more money than either Mills or Attenborough could raise.

With the finished script, Attenborough went to Hollywood to see Charles Bludhorn, then the head of Paramount. It is said that Attenborough sang him the score, danced on the carpet – and Bludhorn was so intrigued that he authorised studio backing for a $6 million budget on the spot.

To everyone’s surprise, the film was a huge success – artistically and at the box office. A portrait of life in the trenches in the First World War, it was set partly on the front line (actually the South Downs in Sussex, standing in for the Somme) and partly on Brighton Pier, where the British High Command, entirely oblivious to the carnage, conducts the war like a concert party. The mounting numbers of the dead and dying are run up on a cricket scoreboard. The end – a track back from a few little white crosses to a field full of them – makes the point more powerfully than words.

It was a promising beginning for an untried director, but hard to live up to, and some felt that many of Attenborough’s biggest spectacles failed to deliver. Young Winston (1972), about Churchill’s early life (education at Harrow, service in the Boer War, first parliamentary speech as MP for Oldham), was a stolid trek through the beginnings of a career that flourished only with the outbreak of the Second World War. A Bridge Too Far (1977), based on Cornelius Ryan’s account of the disastrous airborne attack on Arnhem, ran for three hours, with a plethora of highly paid, underemployed stars in cameo roles, and was barely distinguishable from Hollywood war epics such as Battle of the Bulge and The Longest Day, about the D-Day landings.

Attenborough’s Gandhi film came at the right time, though it marked the high point in his directorial career. His1985 film of the Broadway musical A Chorus Line was criticised in the United States, which resented an Englishman tampering with an essentially American genre. His next film, Cry Freedom (1987), addressed the life of the doomed South African civil rights leader Steve Biko, but it lacked the sweep of Gandhi; and his biopic of the early life of Chaplin (1992), with the title role played by Robert Downey Jr, had no discernible view of an artist who had been deeply controversial in life.

^{In 'Jurassic Park', with Laura Dern and Sam Neill} 

Though, as a director, Attenborough is best remembered for his “blockbusters”, he also made more modest, intimate pictures. Magic (1978), for example, was a variant on the episode in Dead of Night in which a ventriloquist is taken over by his dummy; while Shadowlands (1993), which also starred Anthony Hopkins, was a delicate and moving adaptation of William Nicholson’s play about the unlikely friendship between CS Lewis and the American poet Joy Gresham.

His other films included In Love and War (1997) , about the young Ernest Hemingway and the nurse who cared for him in the First World War (the nucleus of the relationship that Hemingway developed as A Farewell to Arms). Grey Owl (2000) concerns a trapper (Pierce Brosnan) turned conservationist in the 1930s who falls in love with an Iroquois woman. His last film, Closing the Ring, a sentimental love story, was released in 2007.

Richard Attenborough continued to enjoy acting throughout his career as a director. As well as his role in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, He put in a star turn as Kriss Kringle in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and turned his hand to the musical genre – even singing a few lines – at the age of 75 in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999), the filmed version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway musical.

Attenborough was appointed CBE in 1967, knighted in 1976 and created a life peer in 1993. He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1988.

His wife, Sheila Sim, whom he married in 1945, survives him. She abandoned her own career as an actress to bring up their son and two daughters, but in later years she served as a magistrate and was active in a number of charities. Their son is the theatre director Michael Attenborough. Their older daughter, Jane Holland, and Jane’s daughter Lucy died in the tsunami that struck Thailand on Boxing Day 2004. In their memory, Attenborough set up the Jane Holland Creative Centre for Learning in Swaziland.

Lord Attenborough, August 29 1923, died August 24 201
4

Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall was the actress whose partnership with Humphrey Bogart brought a new allure and electricity to the big screen

Lauren Bacall's Hollywood career spanned seven decades

Lauren Bacall, the actress, who has died aged 89, brought a new style of sexual equality and allure to the Hollywood cinema in the 1940s by co-starring in two films with Humphrey Bogart; the couple fell in love while making Howard Hawks’s To Have And Have Not (1944) and were married when they made the same director’s The Big Sleep (1946).

Tall, blonde, slim and sultry, with a hoarse voice and a cryptic personality, Miss Bacall was the perfect match for Bogart’s rugged cynicism, “a leggy, blonde huntress,” as one critic noted, “whose cat’s eyes never blinked before Bogart’s scowls”. In each film they created a special atmosphere of dry, terse comedy and tough guy talk which masked their underlying affection for one another and seemed unique in popular cinema for the balance of power their roles created between the sexes.

Sensual but never sentimental, insolent, sharp-witted, laconic, cool and above all sophisticated, they seemed, as another observer put it, even to kiss out of the corners of their mouths.

Higher brows were moved to compare the tone of these mating games with that of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, though the style owed more to Raymond Chandler or Hemingway than to Shakespeare. At all events, they brought a new and personal chemistry to the screen which made the partnership refreshingly equal at every level.

Although Lauren Bacall was an actress of accomplishment in her own right, it was her acting in only four films with Bogart and their enduring marriage that turned them as a couple into the stuff of legend, and enhanced her own dramatic reputation more than any acting she did elsewhere in films and plays.

^{Lauren Bacall in 1946} 

One of her most famous lines was in To Have And Have Not when they were about to go their separate ways after bidding each other goodnight. At the door she turned and said: “If you want me, all you need to do is whistle. You know how to whistle? You put your lips together and… blow.”

As the American critic James Agee wrote: “Whether or not you like the film will depend almost entirely on whether you like Miss Bacall. I am no judge... It has been years since I have seen such amusing pseudo-toughness on the screen.”

Lauren Bacall, who was born in New York City as Betty Joan Perske on September 16 1924, was the only child of William Perske, a salesman of medical instruments from Alsace, and his wife Natalia, of Rumanian and German-Jewish extraction. They divorced when she was six. The mother adopted the name Bacal; the daughter added an “l” to stop it rhyming with “crackle”. She always disliked “Lauren”, the name bestowed on her by Hollywood, preferring to be known as Betty.

Educated at the expense of wealthy uncles at a private boarding school, Highland Manor, Tarrytown, New York, and at the Julia Richman High School, Manhattan, Betty intended to be a dancer, having attended ballet classes since infancy. But in adolescence she was drawn to acting.

Inspired by Bette Davis films, she enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when she was 15, dating Kirk Douglas, who was there on a scholarship; but as the academy precluded scholarships for girls, she was obliged to leave after a year before bluffing her way into a job modelling sportswear.

Sacked for being Jewish, or flat-chested (or both), she took another job modelling gowns for a Jewish dress shop and in the evenings worked as an usherette. In 1942 she made her stage debut at the Longacre Theatre, New York, as a walk-on in a melodrama called Johnny 2 X 4, and played the ingénue in a pre-Broadway tour later that year. Then she took a job modelling for Harper’s Bazaar.

Leafing through the magazine in 1943, Mrs Howard Hawks, wife of the Hollywood producer, drew her husband’s attention to the girl on the cover. Hawks cabled the magazine asking if she was free, and she turned up on their doorstep.

After a screen test she signed a seven-year contract with Hawks and the producer Jack Warner for $250 a week, changing her name from Betty to Lauren. Hawks went to work on her voice. Taking her to some waste ground, he made her shout Shakespeare and other writers for hours every day in order to lower the tone of what he called her high nasal pipe.

After the daily exercises in the open air her voice became for him (and for the rest of the world) what he called “a satisfactorily low guttural wheeze”. He then insisted that in future she should always speak naturally and softly. Above all, she should ignore suggestions for “cultivating” her voice.

Within a year of her discovery on the front of Harper’s, Hawks had cast her with Bogart in To Have And To Have Not and directed her in such a way that her acting, with its insinuating sexuality and offhand independence, caused a sensation.

Hawks had urged her to play each scene exactly as she felt her character would behave: to act as if she were living the part. If she were true to her own feelings, she would be true to the film.

One scene sprang entirely from her imagination. After an emotional episode in a hotel room with Bogart’s Harry Morgan, Bacall’s Marie left him, according the scenario, and returned to her own room. Between takes, Bacall grumbled to Hawks: “God, I’m dumb.”

“Why?” he asked. “Well”, she replied, “if I had any sense I’d go back after that guy.” So she did.

At 19 she had become, in her first film, one of Hollywood’s most sensational, relaxed and dominating newcomers: husky-voiced, aloof and shrewdly impervious to insult. This was Bogart’s most interesting screen partner for years, in an otherwise hazy melodrama about the French Resistance at Martinique with Bogart as a sea skipper, edgy, grey-voiced, unsure of this strange girl called Marie.

^{Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in 'Dark Passage' in 1947} 

Some of her lines entered film mythology: “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” and, after Bogart has kissed her for the second tentative time: “It’s even better when you help.” To everyone’s astonishment, she also sang (or rather croaked and growled, like a trombone) a suggestive song in a seamen’s bar.

She was promoted by Warner Brothers, her studio, as “The Look” because of her way of looking up suggestively with her lynx-eyes from under a high forehead (and through a haze of cigarette smoke) at the rugged, appreciative Bogart. In 1945 she became his fourth wife; she was 25 years his junior, and the partnership endured until his death nearly 12 years later. Along with her husband, she actively campaigned for the Democrats and protested against Hollywood’s blacklist of suspected Communists.

Lauren Bacall was miscast in Confidential Agent (1945), a thriller derived from Graham Greene’s novel about the Spanish Civil War with Charles Boyer as a Spanish agent; she was, as one critic put it, about as English as Pocahontas, although her “very individual vitality made up for her deficiencies”. The following year, Hawks brought her back with Bogart in The Big Sleep.

^{Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in 'The Big Sleep'} 

The level-pegging of their partnership was curious, unusual and, in those days unexpected in films. One theory was that Hawks’s dislike of Bogart was behind it. Before The Big Sleep, the director was reputed to have said to Bogart: “You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I’m going to make the girl a little more insolent.”

And so it proved. In their second film together, in which she played the rich antagonistic daughter of Bogart’s employer in a fine adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel, she proved every bit as cool and independent as she had been in To Have And Have Not.

Neither of their other two films together was a patch on their predecessors. In Dark Passage (1947), Lauren Bacall sheltered a heavily-bandaged Bogart in his attempt, as an escaped convict, to prove that he had not murdered his wife. All that Delmer Daves’s screenplay proved was that, without sharp dialogue and an element of sexual rivalry or a more intelligent scenario, Bogart and Bacall were not themselves.

^{Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart at a Paris cafe in 1950}

John Huston’s Key Largo (1948) was a far better film, but it still failed to find any of the old style of banter for them to exchange in its tense tale of a bunch of gangsters who invade a hotel run by Miss Bacall, a war widow.

It was as if, having awakened public interest in the pair as a screen partnership, Warner Brothers could not find material to keep their characters effectively together. This was the film in which, to get the right facial expression from Lauren Bacall, Huston twisted her arm. He got the right expression but he never got her into another of his films. Key Largo was also her last film with Bogart who, unlike Lauren Bacall, went on to make some of the finest films of his career.

In 1950 she was the socialite who married Bix Beiderbecke (Kirk Douglas) in Young Man With A Horn, and appeared with Gary Cooper in Bright Leaf. Her gift for acid comedy came out nicely in Jean Negulesco’s How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and in the same director’s A Woman’s World (1954).

^{Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe on the set of How to Marry a Millionaire} 

As an occupational therapist and Richard Widmark’s mistress in Vincente Minnelli’s Designing Woman (1957), she was miscast as a scatterbrained fashion queen opposite Gregory Peck.

In Douglas Sirk’s Written On The Wind (1957) she was supposed to have been swept off her feet by an oil millionaire. Was the baby his (Robert Stack’s) or his best friend’s (Rock Hudson’s)? Nobody much cared, least of all Miss Bacall, for Bogart died that year .

Two years later, after playing a tough-talking American governess in the British melodrama North-West Frontier, with Kenneth More, Lauren Bacall decided to return to the stage after an absence of 17 years. As Charlie in Goodbye Charlie (Lyceum, 1959), the story of a man’s return to earth after death as a woman, she played with considerable success opposite Sidney Chaplin.

In 1961 Lauren Bacall married the actor Jason Robards. (There had been earlier talk of marriage to Frank Sinatra, “but Frank just couldn’t cope with the idea” she said years later).

In the 1960s her films became less reliable . In Shock Treatment (1964) she played a batty psychiatrist; in Sex and the Single Girl (1965) a squabbling neighbour (with Henry Fonda); and in Jack Smight’s Harper (1966) a vindictive wife in a film which paid homage to Bogart, with Paul Newman as a private detective.

^{Lauren Bacall} 

After that she worked mostly on Broadway. Apart from more than a year’s run as Stephanie, the nurse, in Abe Burrows’s comedy Cactus Flower (Royale, 1965), which some admirers considered the best role of her career, she spent three years as Margo Channing, a stage star threatened by a young rival in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Applause, first in New York (Palace, 1970), for which she received a Tony award, then in Toronto, Chicago and on tour, before making her London debut in the same part at Her Majesty’s (1972).

Her role in Applause was the one Bette Davis had filled more flamboyantly in the film All About Eve. Lauren Bacall’s stage acting showed the same agreeable insouciance as her film acting .

She returned to the screen in 1974 in the Agatha Christie derivation, Murder On The Orient Express; and two years later faced, with admirable and stylish antagonism, John Wayne in Don Siegel’s The Shootist. This brought together one tough hombre and one tough cookie, and was the sharpest match since Bacall had first met Bogart.

As an indefatigable journalist in her own musical, Woman of the Year, on Broadway in 1981, she took a slight story, according to the The Daily Telegraph’s John Barber, and injected into it “all the dynamism of a fascinating personality”.

In 1985 she was back in the West End in Harold Pinter’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (Haymarket).

The Fan (1981) brought her back to the screen as a successful actress entangled with a young man in her first Broadway musical, and seven years later she contributed to another all-star Agatha Christie film, Appointment With Death. She also stole a child in a psychological film thriller, Tree of Hands.

Of her many television appearances the most notable included Blithe Spirit and The Petrified Forest in 1956 and a role in the Frederick Forsyth Presents drama series.

Lauren Bacall was, perhaps, an actress more famous for whom she was thought to be than for what she actually did. “It was those pale eyes framed by a tawny mane, a way of walking that suggested a panther in her family tree, and a husky voice that could set a spinal column aquiver,” noted one reviewer.

She kept up the image of a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense feminist in interview after interview down the years. Journalists were slightly scared of her. But in truth — and unlike, say, Garbo — she did not have a large body of work that commanded respect. Her fame rested largely on the early films with Bogart, in which she gives as good as she gets, and really on only two of those . The rest of her career sometimes seemed like an afterthought, but she remained in the public eye in the largely unfulfilled hope of a second wind.

^{Lauren Bacall in later life} 

Her memoir, By Myself, appeared in 1978, followed in 2005 by And Then Some by way of an addendum. In this she described working visits to Paris making Robert Altman’s satirical Prêt à Porter (1994) and to Britain, where she starred in The Visit at the Chichester Festival in 1995.

Lauren Bacall received a Golden Globe and an honorary Oscar. In 1996 she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces. She continued to make occasional appearances on screen, including, in 2006, appearing as herself in an episode of The Sopranos. In 2004 she had a supporting role alongside Nicole Kidman in Birth, a psychological drama directed by Jonathan Glazer.

Her marriage to Jason Robards ended in divorce in 1969. In 1983 there had been talk of marrying Harry Guardino, a former film co-star, but it came to nothing. She had a son and a daughter with Humphrey Bogart and a son with Jason Robards.

Lauren Bacall, born September 16 1924, died August 12 201
4

Robin Williams

Robin Williams was a comedian and actor whose live-wire delivery could express both depth of character and pathos

Robin Williams in Australia in 2011 

s

Robin Williams, who has died aged 63, was one of America’s most versatile and successful comedy actors; brilliant at improvisation and mimicry, he made his name on the stand-up comedy circuit, while on screen he was able to portray anyone from a post-menopausal grande dame (Mrs Doubtfire) to a psychopathic killer (One Hour Photo).

Stardom came in the early 1970s after he had taken a cameo role as Mork, an extraterrestrial in the television sitcom Happy Days. Williams’s eccentric, largely improvised performance was a huge hit and spawned a spin-off sitcom, Mork and Mindy, in which Mork lands on Earth and ends up sharing an apartment with the girl next door. The series — which ran on ABC from 1978 to 1982, and arrived in Britain in 1979 — showcased the frenzied energy and amazing facility with voices and faces which he would later use in his films. Mork and Mindy eventually reached an audience of 60 million.

After making his screen debut in Robert Altman’s ill-fated 1980 version of Popeye, Williams’s breakthrough came in 1987, when he played Adrian Cronauer, a motormouth DJ who gets up the noses of the top brass in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987).

^{Robin Williams in 'Good Morning, Vietnam'} 

He delivered an Academy Award-winning performance as a psychologist battling his own emotional demons in Good Will Hunting (1997), and won several Oscar nominations — including one for his performance in 1993 as Mrs Doubtfire, the ex-husband who infiltrates himself back into the bosom of the family by disguising himself as a middle-aged Scottish nanny.

Hollywood directors sometimes found it difficult to harness Williams’s talents to a script and a storyline strong enough to take him. There were memorable flops, among them The Survivors (1983), Club Paradise (1986), Toys (1992), Patch Adams (1998), Jakob The Liar (1999) and Bicentennial Man (1999). But he won Oscar nominations for his roles as the mildly anarchic teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989) and as the deranged tramp who leads Jeff Bridges towards personal redemption in The Fisher King (1991).

His critics often complained that Williams’s characters were all the same: cuddly, waifish innocents with a mawkish need to ingratiate themselves with their audience. And there was, admittedly, something curiously sexless about his performances. One American columnist described his appearance as the owner of a gay club in The Birdcage (1996) as akin to “a hirsute construction worker halfway through a sex change operation who can’t afford to finish the job”. Of his performance as a psychologist in Awakenings (1990), one critic observed: “This is another of Robin Williams’s benevolent eunuch roles.” He certainly never got anywhere near a screen clinch.

Yet Williams proved he could play it straight; and he could play it nasty, too. In later life he revealed a darker, more interesting side to his acting. In Insomnia (2002) he put in a masterly performance as a sociopathic killer on the run from Al Pacino’s LAPD cop in the frozen wastes of Alaska. In One Hour Photo (2002) he was chilling as a photo lab technician who becomes obsessed with a family whose films he develops. And in The Night Listener (2006) he played a radio show host who realises that he has developed a friendship with a child who may not exist.

^{Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire} 

Williams first made his name on the stand-up comedy circuit, and the versatility which was so evident in his later career would have come as no surprise to those familiar with the virtuoso free-fall improvisation of his stage routines. One critic wondered whether the star of such sickly-sweet offerings as Jack (1996) or What Dreams May Come (1998) could be “the same Robin Williams who used to spend two hours on stage pretending to be a penis”.

An only child, Robin McLaurin Williams was born on July 21 1951 in Chicago. His mother was a former model, his father an executive with Ford. The family moved several times during his childhood, at one point living in a house with 40 rooms.

Williams was often portrayed as a lonely child who tried to use humour to build friendships and avoid being picked on. Perhaps, he once joked, it was “because my mother was a Christian Dior Scientist... I was not only picked on physically but intellectually — people used to kick copies of George Sand in my face.” But he denied being the class clown, and claimed that he got into acting in his final year at Redwood High School simply “to get laid”.

^{Robin Williams as Mork in 'Mork and Mindy'}

After leaving school, and a brief spell studying political science, Williams won a place at the Juilliard Academy in New York to study drama. There he demonstrated such extraordinary gifts for improvisation and mimicry that his tutors advised him to concentrate on comedy. He became a close friend of his fellow student Christopher Reeve, and the two remained close until Reeve’s death in 2004, nine years after the riding accident that had left him paralysed from the neck down. Their relationship demonstrated the loyal, decent side of Williams’s character. When Reeves’s medical insurance ran out, Williams picked up the tab for many of the bills; then, after Reeves’s widow, Dana, died in 2006, he provided practical and financial support for their 14-year-old son.

After two years at the Juilliard, Williams moved to San Francisco, where he worked in restaurants by day and on the comedy circuit by night until his lucky break on Happy Days. The live stand-up comedy circuit remained a consistent thread throughout his career, and he sometimes turned up unannounced at San Francisco clubs just to get up on stage and start “riffing” — a great way to “peel off any pretence”, as he put it.

In his films and television performances, Williams often ad-libbed his own dialogue. The story goes that his television scriptwriters on Mork and Mindy got so fed up that they took to sending blank pages down to the set, inscribed “Robin Williams does his thing”.

For some reason his stand-up routine did not go down so well on the other side of the Atlantic. “I went to a club in Windsor and I just died,” he recalled. “It was the worst night of my life. A friend was watching and laughing his ass off because all you could hear was the clink of glasses.”

^{Robin Williams on stage} 

In 1978 Williams married his first wife, Valerie Velardi, a former dancer; but as a result of life in the fast lane he had become addicted to cocaine (“God’s way of telling you you’ve made too much money”, as he remarked). In the early 1980s his marriage fell apart and he started to make bad career moves, choosing films that bombed. But the death from a drugs overdose in 1982 of his friend the actor John Belushi, just hours after Williams had been with him, led Williams to rethink his own lifestyle. He went into rehab and sobered up.

The critical success of Good Morning, Vietnam was followed by a voice role as the Genie in Disney’s cartoon Aladdin (1992), in which — left in the studio with a microphone — Williams spun off into imitations of everyone from Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson to Carol Channing. Disney ended up with 30 hours of his improvisations, to which the animation was adapted later to synch with his voice-over. What started as a small cameo role eventually stole the show and helped make Aladdin the biggest earner in Disney’s history. By the time of Mrs Doubtfire in 1993 Williams was one of the biggest boxoffice draws in the world.

In August 2008 Williams announced a 26-city stand-up comedy tour entitled Weapons of Self-Destruction. Though he explained that the tour was his last chance to have fun at the expense of George W Bush, the title could just as well have applied to himself. In 2006 he had gone into rehab for alcoholism, and in 2008 his second wife, Marsha Garces, whom he had married in 1986 and who had become his producer, filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.Williams’s many other film credits include Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991), in which he played the adult Peter Pan, and Flubber (1997), in which he was an absent-minded professor who invents a miraculous flying green gloop. He starred in Paul Mazursky’s Moscow on the Hudson (1984); appeared in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997); and played Theodore Roosevelt in the three Night at the Museum movies, the last of which is currently in post-production. He also played President Eisenhower in The Butler (2013).

An avid video games player, and a fan of professional road cycling and Rugby Union, Williams owned a vineyard in the Napa Valley, California, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities, including Comic Relief. In addition to his Oscar awards and nominations, he won six Golden Globes, two Screen Actors’ Guild Awards and three Grammy awards.

He belonged to the Episcopal Church (“Catholic Lite — same rituals, half the guilt”), and was philosophical about death. “In your fifties, loss is a thing you live with a lot,” he told an interviewer . “Pretty soon friends will be checking out from natural causes. It’s the grim rapper, he’s comin’.”

Robin Williams, who had recently been suffering from depression, died at his San Francisco Bay home in an apparent suicide.

He is survived by his third wife, Susan Schneider, whom he married in 2011, by a son of his first marriage and by a daughter and son of his second.

Robin Williams, born July 21 1951, died August 11 201
4