Robin Williams told Sally Field that she should go home and made sure the shooting schedule was changed when her father unexpectedly died while she was filming “Mrs. Doubtfire” in the early 1990s, the actress revealed ahead of the 10-year anniversary of the legendary actor and comedian’s death.
“I never shared this story before,” the 77-year-old, who played Williams’ soon-to-be-ex-wife in the 1993 classic comedy, told Vanity Fair recently. “I was in the camper outside the courtroom where we were shooting the divorce scene. My father had a stroke a couple of years before, and was in a nursing facility. I got a phone call from the doctor saying my father had passed, a massive stroke.”
She said she simply told hospital staff to “please lean down and say, ‘Sally says goodbye,’” because her father didn’t want to be on a resuscitator.
“I was, of course, beside myself,” she said. “I came on the set trying with all my might to act. I wasn’t crying. Robin came over, pulled me out of the set, and asked, ‘Are you okay?’”
She said after she told him what had happened he said, ‘Oh my God, we need to get you out here right now.’”
“And he made it happen — they shot around me the rest of the day. I could go back to my house, call my brother, and make arrangements. It’s a side of Robin that people rarely knew: He was very sensitive and intuitive,” she said.
Field added that while shooting the zany comedy, “It was my task to simply respond to whatever he did, as a real person would. I completely loved that stay-on-your-toes feeling. You couldn’t really see what ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ was on the page. It became its own life form primarily because of him.”
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Mara Wilson, who played Williams’ youngest of three children in the movie, shared a similar experience with Vanity Fair of him checking in on her after her mother died.
“People are always surprised when I tell them that Robin could be very quiet,” she said. “When I was nine, we did a table read of ‘What Dreams May Come,’ shortly after my mother had died. He came up to me and very gently asked how I was, and how my family was, but didn’t bring up anything that could have been painful. He was just very sweet.”
She said he was also very playful with her when they worked on “Mrs. Doubtfire” together.
“He used to make his hands talk and argue with each other: ‘I don’t like you! You smell like poop!’ ‘Hey, there’s no toilet paper at my house!’ Which is the funniest thing ever to a five-year-old,” she told Vanity Fair. “There’s actually a bit in ‘Friend Like Me’ [from ‘Aladdin’] where The Genie’s hands do a little backup singing and scatting behind him. The animators must have gotten that idea from him — they looked and sounded exactly like the talking hands he’d used to make me laugh. I think he just got kids.”
Lisa Jakub, who played Wilson’s older sister in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” told Fox News Digital in May that the comedian was one of the first people to speak to her about mental health issues.
Calling Williams “thoughtful and generous,” she said he was also “probably one of the first people who ever really spoke to me super honestly about mental health. And he would talk to me about his struggles and the things that he went through. And it was the first time that I felt like, ‘Oh, I’m not a freak. I don’t have to hide this about myself. This is just something that some of us have to deal with.’”
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Jakub, who founded a nonprofit that helps veterans with issues like PTSD and anxiety, said that Williams was very involved with service members.
“So many people have told me that Robin did a lot of work with the veteran population as well, and that he always had production crews hire local veterans to be background actors or things like that on set, which is not something I ever knew about when I worked with him,” Jakub explained, “but I also love that little connection as well.”
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She added, “Robin was everything you would hope Robin would be, and it’s so wonderful to think back on him now,” Jakub said of her experience with the iconic comedian who died on Aug. 11, 2014. She added that she was “grateful that I got to be in his presence, that I got to be working with him, that he was so kind to me.”
