Propelled to fame in the late 1970s as a lovable alien on the smash sitcom “Mork & Mindy,” he made the transition to movie stardom with apparent ease, weaving between broad comedy and more serious dramatic turns. My fiancee and I were like, ‘Is he OK?’ I didn’t know it would get this dark.”įrom the outside, Williams’ career looked like one that any actor would envy. “You could just tell something was off,” Pearl said. Williams, who had battled drug and alcohol addiction early in his career, had just come out of a stint in rehab in Minnesota, where he had gone, his publicist said at the time, to “fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment” to his sobriety.
Boyd declined to say whether Williams had left a note.Ĭomedian and longtime friend Steven Pearl ran into Williams at a barbecue last month in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he could see that something was wrong. Toxicology tests will be conducted to determine whether he had drugs or alcohol in his system. Recent cut marks were visible on his wrist, and a pocket knife was found near his body.īoyd confirmed that Williams had “received treatment for depression” but declined to speculate on what may have led the actor to take his own life.
Keith Boyd, assistant deputy chief coroner for the Marin County Sheriff’s Department, told reporters. His assistant arrived about an hour later and found him hanging by a belt affixed to a closet door, slightly elevated in a seated position, Lt. The actor’s wife, Susan Schneider, had left their home that morning at 10:30. Williams appeared to have died of asphyxia due to hanging, authorities said Tuesday. He would send texts and things like that, but they would get shorter and shorter.” “He started to disconnect,” comedian Rick Overton, a friend of Williams’ since the 1970s, said Tuesday.
In recent months - as Williams wrestled with the cancellation of his CBS TV series “The Crazy Ones” and fought to maintain a sobriety that had at times proved fragile - those friends could see that he was losing that fight.
But Williams’ closest friends and colleagues knew well that beneath his manic, Technicolor exterior, the actor had battled depression for years. In the wake of Williams’ death at his home here Monday, fans around the world have struggled to understand what could have led a man whose thousand-megawatt comic persona had brought so much joy to millions to such depths of despair. But the road that led to Robin Williams’ apparent suicide at age 63 was a long one - and if you knew where to look, there were plenty of signposts indicating trouble along the way. The end was shockingly sudden: a belt hung on a door an assistant’s distraught call to 911.