The funniest man I ever met … Robin Williams

The funniest man I have ever met? Hands down, that would be Robin Williams, who convulsed a room full of journalists with his verbal gymnastics — even crawling on the floor at one point to get a laugh — at a dinner for his film “One Hour Photo” at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

He explained to me that the film — a thriller in which Williams played a lonely photo technical who develops a pathological obsession with his customers — was a deliberate attempt to move beyond the comedies and the sometimes schmaltzy dramas with which he had become identified.

In “One Hour Photo,” Williams, not for the first time, showed the depths he could plumb in his character’s tortured soul. And he was even better as a serial killer in Alaska playing a cat-and-mouse in Christopher Nolan’s severely underrated “Insomnia” from that same year.

“I’ve always wanted to mix things up, but it’s been difficult,” he told me. “When you play happy people in popular movies, that’s the kind of scripts studios send you because that’s what their research tells them audiences want to see.”

Make no mistake about it, Robin Williams was one of the funniest actors ever to grace the big or small screen, beginning with his breakthrough role on TV as the manic extraterrestrial in “Mork and Mindy.”

That he was capable of being much, much more than hilarious was obvious in his stunning film debut in a very tricky role — the tragically promiscuous writer in the ambitious adaptation of John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” (1982).

Many of Williams’ movies (and he made a lot of them) were unworthy of his talents, but he almost always gave them his best. With a good script he could knock it out of the park, often in roles that combined comedy and drama, like his naive immigrant navigating the mysteries of the Big Apple in “Moscow on the Hudson” (1984) and his irreverent GI disc jockey battling Army brass in “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987). He brought great skill and humanity to serious roles as a teacher in “Dead Poets Society” (1989) and as a shy neurologist who performs a short-lived miracle on patients in “Awakenings” (1990).

Oscar-nominated for both “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Dead Poets Society,” he scored his Best Actor third nod for another tour-de-force, as a psychotic homeless man who helps the shock jock who caused his condition in “The Fisher King” (1991).

A gifted physical comedian as well as a lightning-fast improvisational comedian, Williams also did some of his funniest-ever screen work during that decade. His super-fast-talking (and -singing) Genie in “Aladdin” is considered by many the greatest-ever voice performance in an animated movie. He was also falling-down funny, and touching, as a man who poses as a nanny in his ex-wife’s home to spend time with his kids in the phenomenally popular “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), and as the straighter of two gay lovers trying to pull off a deception for the benefit of their son in “The Birdcage.”

He finally won an Oscar — for Best Supporting Actor — as a psychotherapist with a dark secret in “Good Will Hunting” (1997).

Williams had nothing really to prove after this, but he kept making movies and TV shows at a workaholic pace for the rest of his career, unwisely playing, among other things, a robot who lives 200 years in “Bicentennial Man” (2000). More recently, he alternated small roles in big movies — Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower in “The Butler” and Teddy Roosevelt in “Night at the Museum” — with exquisite portraits of often troubled individuals in indie projects, like the neighbor with an unrequited crush on neighbor Annette Bening in last year’s “Face of Love.”

Back in 2002, Williams admitted that he sometimes winced at the reviews he got for films like “Patch Adams,” in which he played an unorthodox physician. “People love these movies and they serve a purpose, so I’m not going to apologize for them,” he said. “I promise you, a few more pictures like ‘One Hour Photo’ and people will be begging me to play happy people again.”

Happy, sad or psychotic, Robin Williams leaves an amazing legacy with his work.

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