Sally Field was in front of the camera with Robin Williams for the comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire”. Now she recalled an emotional gesture on set.
It has been exactly ten years since the world, his fans and his loved ones had to say goodbye to Robin Williams. The comedian and actor took his own life in 2014 after a long period of suffering – he had Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was only 63 years old. A shock, then as now. Until then, Williams was always considered to be in a good mood and a thoroughbred comedian who still had so much to give. Hardly anyone knew that he was suffering from severe depression.
But Williams was also a philanthropist, committed to helping children and the weak in society and set up his own foundation, the Windfall Foundation, in 1992. And he was always there when he was needed. “Superman” star Christopher Reeve, who died in 2004, recalled that Williams was one of the first people to visit him in hospital in 1995 after his serious riding accident. Disguised as a German doctor, he insisted on performing a proctoscopy on Reeve to make him laugh (via US Weekly).
To commemorate one of the most likeable Hollywood stars ever, actress Sally Field recalled an incident on the set of the comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire“, which you can stream via Disney+. The film by director Chris Columbus (“Kevin Home Alone”, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”) became a huge box office hit in 1993 with worldwide takings of 441 million US dollars, beaten only by Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” that year. Field had to deal with a family bereavement during filming. And it was Williams who immediately sensed that something was wrong (via Vanity Fair):
“I’ve never told this story before: I was sitting in the RV outside the courtroom where we were filming the divorce scene. My father had suffered a stroke a few years earlier and had been in a care facility ever since. I received a call from the doctor and he said that my father had died, a severe stroke. He asked me if I wanted life-sustaining measures to be initiated. I said: ‘No, he wouldn’t have wanted that. Just let him go. And please lean down and say, ‘Sally says goodbye’. I was beside myself, of course. I came on set and tried with all my might to act. I didn’t cry. Robin [Williams] came over, took me aside and asked, ‘Are you okay?”
When he learned from Field that her father had passed away, he immediately made sure that she had the day off to take care of all the necessary things: “It’s a side of Robin that hardly anyone knew. He was very sensitive and attentive.”
“Mrs. Doubtfire” co-star Mara Wilson also remembers Robin Williams
Many other stars such as Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and filmmaker Peter Weir have told Vanity Fair about their special memories of Robin Williams. Mara Wilson, who had the pleasure of acting alongside Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire” when she was just six years old, can also confirm his empathetic side. She had a joint reading for the movie “Beyond the Horizon – The End is Only the Beginning”. In the end, she didn’t get the role she auditioned for, but she still remembers this special moment with the actor:
“People are always surprised when I tell them that Robin could be very quiet. When I was nine years old, we had a reading for ‘Beyond the Horizon’ just after my mother died. He came up to me and asked very gently how I was doing and how my family was doing; but he didn’t bring up anything that could have been painful. He was just so sweet.”
