It was only after his death that Robin Williams’s widow, Susan Schneider, was able to learn the truth. In 2014, the beloved, Oscar-winning comedian died by suicide, with initial reports indicating that he had been suffering from depression. However, an autopsy revealed that Williams had actually been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a degenerative disease that includes depression among its many symptoms. Just over a year after his death, Schneider shared Williams’s diagnosis with the world in an interview on Good Morning America. Now she’s gone even deeper, sitting down for a series of in-depth interviews in the revealing new documentary Robin’s Wish.
In the film, available to rent on iTunes, director Tylor Norwood takes a deep, unyielding look at Williams’s life, interviewing the actor’s friends and family. He also charts a scientific path, interviewing medical professionals who take great care to explain the effects of Lewy body dementia and the particular impact it might have had on someone like Williams. At the time of his death, the comedic genius was still squarely in the spotlight, juggling a number of film, TV, and stand-up projects. But as the documentary reveals, acting had become increasingly difficult for Williams, and the disease impacted his ability to perform far more than the public ever knew.
Filmmaker Shawn Levy, who directed Williams in one of his final projects, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, is among the voices in the doc who shed light on Williams’s condition. Shooting for that particular film—a PG-rated comedy that starred Williams as Theodore Roosevelt—took place in May 2014, just a few months before Williams’s death in August. Levy recalled seeing signs that Williams, who was known for his improvisational acting style, was having difficulty with the job.
“Robin was struggling in a way that he hadn’t before to remember lines and to combine the right words with the performance,” Levy said. “Robin would call me—at ten at night, at two in the morning, at four in the morning—saying, ‘Is it usable? Is any of it usable? Do I suck? What’s going on?’ I would reassure him.”
Like the 2018 biography Robin, written by New York Times reporter Dave Itzkoff, Robin’s Wish paints a detailed portrait of Williams’s inner turmoil. Guiding the documentary is Schneider, who speaks placidly about the life she built with the comedian, whom she married in 2011. The graphic artist, who wrote an essay about Lewy body dementia for the journal Neurology in 2016, traces Williams’s increased anxiety and how he had been misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s.
There’s a particularly heartbreaking moment in the documentary in which Schneider pinpoints the moment she realized Williams was having cognitive lapses. Williams had been experiencing insomnia, so it was recommended the couple begin sleeping in separate bedrooms. Williams, she recalled, then asked Schneider, “Does this mean we’re separated?”
“That was a really shocking moment,” Schneider recalled in a recent interview on the Today show. “When your best friend, your partner, your love—you realize that there’s a giant chasm somewhere and you can’t see where it is. But that’s just not based in reality. That was a hard moment.”
Robin’s Wish is not only meant to share the knotty details of Williams’s difficult final years. It’s also striving to raise awareness about Lewy body dementia and the importance of mental health—and the film manages this, to devastating effect. Schneider has now made it her mission to raise awareness, tying it back to Williams’s own ethos about the meaning of life.
“I asked him, ‘When we get to the end of our lives and we’re looking back, what is it we want to have done?’” Schneider recalled. “Without missing a beat, he said, ‘I want to help people be less afraid.’ I thought it was beautiful, and I said, ‘Honey, you’re already doing that. That’s what you do.’”
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