Robin Williams: 'I was shameful, did stuff that caused disgust – that's hard to recover from'
His new film, World's Greatest Dad, is a glorious return to form. But a mournful Robin Williams would rather talk about his battle with drugs and alcohol – and recovering from heart surgery
THE GUARDIAN · 19,813 個分享
"All illness is a great leveller, but none levels like mental illness. It remains the poor relation of medicine. Research is paltry. Therapies are halfhearted. Drugs are primitive. But addictive and depressive illness seems to probe deep into the relations between individuals and those around them. It is the crack in the window that can seem beyond mending. The sadness of the clown goes beyond irony. It is one of the great mysteries of life" (via Comment is free)
昨晚到今天，關於ROBIN WILLIAMS的英文悼文數十篇。我暫用紐約時報的：
Q. and A. With Stuart Elliott
By STUART ELLIOTT
Robin Williams for the iPad Air, and a nostalgic song for "The Spoils of Babylon."
ROBIN WILLIAMS, 1951-2014
Frenetic Comic, Giddy TV Alien, Oscar Winner
Mr. Williams, 63, had imbued a lifetime of performances with a wild inventiveness and energy. The Marin County sheriff’s office said it suspected the death was a suicide.
AN APPRAISAL
An Improvisational Genius, Forever in the Moment
To those who saw him, Robin Williams was a comedic force of nature who delivered humor at warp speed.
Actor and comedian Robin Williams was found dead at his home Monday, according to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. The Oscar-winning actor was known for both his stand-up comedy as well as his film and television performances. From the solemn role in “Good Will Hunting,” for which he won the Academy Award, to the explosive raunch of “The Birdcage,” Williams displayed a rare ability to steal both the dramatic scene, and the comedic.
Here are six of his most notable moments on screen:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/08/11/six-of-robin-williamss-best-performances-video/
When Mark Cole's daughter had an incurable brain tumor, Robin Williams chartered a private jet to spend a day with her:http://cnn.it/1pM3Jh7
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Robin Williams, an Improvisational Genius, Forever Present in the Moment
An AppraisalBy A. O. SCOTTAugust 13, 2014
Robin Williams was an irrepressible performer, on stage and off.
Gary Settle
Some years ago, at a party at the Cannes Film Festival, I was leaning against a rail watching a fireworks display when I heard a familiar voice behind me. Or rather, at least a dozen voices, punctuating the offshore explosions with jokes, non sequiturs and off-the-wall pop-cultural, sexual and political references.
There was no need to turn around: The voices were not talking directly to me and they could not have belonged to anyone other than Robin Williams, who was extemporizing a monologue at least as pyrotechnically amazing as what was unfolding against the Mediterranean sky. I’m unable to recall the details now, but you can probably imagine the rapid-fire succession of accents and pitches — macho basso, squeaky girly, French, Spanish, African-American, human, animal and alien — entangling with curlicues of self-conscious commentary about the sheer ridiculousness of anyone trying to narrate explosions of colored gunpowder in real time.
Very few people would try to upstage fireworks, and probably only Robin Williams could have succeeded. I doubt anyone asked him for his play-by-play, an impromptu performance for a small, captive group, and I can’t say if it arose from inspiration or compulsion. Maybe there’s not really a difference. Whether or not anyone expected him to be, and maybe whether or not he entirely wanted to be, he was on.
Part of the shock of his death on Monday came from the fact that he had been on — ubiquitous, self-reinventing, insistently present — for so long. On Twitter, mourners dated themselves with memories of the first time they had noticed him. For some it was the movie “Aladdin.” For others “Dead Poets Society” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” I go back even further, to the “Mork and Mindy” television show and an album called “Reality — What a Concept” that blew my eighth-grade mind.
Back then, it was clear that Mr. Williams was one of the most explosively, exhaustingly, prodigiously verbal comedians who ever lived. The only thing faster than his mouth was his mind, which was capable of breathtaking leaps of free-associative absurdity. Janet Maslin, reviewing his standup act in 1979, cataloged a tumble of riffs that ranged from an impression of Jacques Cousteau to “an evangelist at the Disco Temple of Comedy,” to Truman Capote Jr. at “the Kindergarten of the Stars” (whatever that was). “He acts out the Reader’s Digest condensed version of ‘Roots,’ ” Ms. Maslin wrote, “which lasts 15 seconds in its entirety. He improvises a Shakespearean-sounding epic about the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, playing all the parts himself, including Einstein’s ghost.” (That, or something like it, was a role he would reprise more than 20 years later in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.”)
Robin Williams was an irrepressible performer, on stage and off.
Gary Settle
Some years ago, at a party at the Cannes Film Festival, I was leaning against a rail watching a fireworks display when I heard a familiar voice behind me. Or rather, at least a dozen voices, punctuating the offshore explosions with jokes, non sequiturs and off-the-wall pop-cultural, sexual and political references.
There was no need to turn around: The voices were not talking directly to me and they could not have belonged to anyone other than Robin Williams, who was extemporizing a monologue at least as pyrotechnically amazing as what was unfolding against the Mediterranean sky. I’m unable to recall the details now, but you can probably imagine the rapid-fire succession of accents and pitches — macho basso, squeaky girly, French, Spanish, African-American, human, animal and alien — entangling with curlicues of self-conscious commentary about the sheer ridiculousness of anyone trying to narrate explosions of colored gunpowder in real time.
Very few people would try to upstage fireworks, and probably only Robin Williams could have succeeded. I doubt anyone asked him for his play-by-play, an impromptu performance for a small, captive group, and I can’t say if it arose from inspiration or compulsion. Maybe there’s not really a difference. Whether or not anyone expected him to be, and maybe whether or not he entirely wanted to be, he was on.
Part of the shock of his death on Monday came from the fact that he had been on — ubiquitous, self-reinventing, insistently present — for so long. On Twitter, mourners dated themselves with memories of the first time they had noticed him. For some it was the movie “Aladdin.” For others “Dead Poets Society” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” I go back even further, to the “Mork and Mindy” television show and an album called “Reality — What a Concept” that blew my eighth-grade mind.
Back then, it was clear that Mr. Williams was one of the most explosively, exhaustingly, prodigiously verbal comedians who ever lived. The only thing faster than his mouth was his mind, which was capable of breathtaking leaps of free-associative absurdity. Janet Maslin, reviewing his standup act in 1979, cataloged a tumble of riffs that ranged from an impression of Jacques Cousteau to “an evangelist at the Disco Temple of Comedy,” to Truman Capote Jr. at “the Kindergarten of the Stars” (whatever that was). “He acts out the Reader’s Digest condensed version of ‘Roots,’ ” Ms. Maslin wrote, “which lasts 15 seconds in its entirety. He improvises a Shakespearean-sounding epic about the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, playing all the parts himself, including Einstein’s ghost.” (That, or something like it, was a role he would reprise more than 20 years later in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.”)
Onstage, Mr. Williams’s speed allowed him to test audience responses and to edit and change direction on the fly. He simultaneously explained and acted out this process in“Come Inside My Mind,” a two-and-a-half-minute tour de force of manic meta — “I’m doing great! I’m improvising like crazy! No you’re not, you fool! You’re just doing pee-pee-ca-ca, no substance!” But if Mr. Williams was often self-aware, commenting on what he was doing as he was doing it, he was rarely arch or insincere. He could, as an actor, succumb to treacliness sometimes — maybe more than sometimes — but his essential persona as an entertainer combined neediness and generosity, intelligence and kindness, in ways that were charming and often unexpectedly moving as well.
In his periodic post-“Mork and Mindy” television appearances (on “The Larry Sanders Show” and more recently on “Louie”), he often played sly, sad or surprising versions of himself, the Robin Williams some of us had known and loved since childhood, which means an entertainer we sometimes took for granted or allowed ourselves to tire of. Many of his memorable big-screen performances were variations on that persona — madcap, motor-mouthed, shape-shifting jokers like the genie in “Aladdin,” the anti-authoritarian D.J. in “Good Morning Vietnam,” Parry in “The Fisher King” and even the redoubtable Mrs. Doubtfire herself.
That was a role within a role, of course, and Mr. Williams’s best serious movie characters — or maybe we should say the non-silly ones, since an element of playfulness was always there — had a similar doubleness. Watching him acting in earnest, you could not help but be aware of the exuberance, the mischief, that was being held in check, and you couldn’t help but wonder when, how or if it would burst out. That you knew what he was capable of made his feats of self-control all the more exciting. You sometimes felt that he was aware of this, and that he enjoyed the sheer improbability of appearing as the straight man, the heavy, the voice of reason.
He was very good at playing it cool or quiet or restrained as other actors in his movies — Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage,” Robert DeNiro in “Awakenings,” Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting” — brought the heat, the noise or the wildness. He was an excellent and disciplined character actor, even as he was also an irrepressible, indelible character, a voice — or voices — that many of us have been hearing for as long as we can remember.
悼文2014年08月13日
羅賓·威廉姆斯，在台上台下都是令人無法抗拒的表演藝術家。
Gary Settle
幾年前，在戛納電影節的某個派對上，我正倚着欄杆看煙花，身後傳來一個熟悉的聲音——或者說至少十幾個聲音，聊着瘋瘋癲癲的流行文化、性與政治，夾雜着笑話和胡言亂語，點綴在海邊煙花的砰然巨響之間。
沒必要轉過身去：那些聲音不是在直接對我說話，它們也不可能屬於別人，只可能屬於羅賓·威廉姆斯(Robin Williams)，他正在即興表演獨白，和地中海的天空里展開的焰火一樣精彩紛呈。如今我已無法回想起細節，但你大概可以想像他的口音和語調，如同連串噴射的火焰——大男人的口音、嘰嘰喳喳的女孩口音、法國口音、西班牙口音、非裔美國人口音、人類的聲音、動物與異形的聲音——不時還有一個清醒的聲音，評論着實時描述彩色火藥在空中爆炸這種行為有多麼荒謬。
幾乎沒有人會嘗試和煙花搶戲，而且大概只有羅賓·威廉姆斯才能勝出。我懷疑根本沒有人邀請他為這一小群心醉神迷的觀眾做這場即席表演和現場評說，也說不清這是否出於一時的靈感抑或衝動。或許這根本沒什麼區別。不管有沒有人希望他表演，又或許不管他自己是否願意，他就這樣上場了。
星期一他的死訊傳來時，我的震驚部分來自於他竟然已經表演了那麼久——無時無刻地表演、不斷重新自我塑造、持續性的在場。在Twitter上，哀悼者們回憶第一次注意他時的影片。有些人是通過《阿拉丁》(Aladdin)認識他，有些人則是通過《死亡詩社》(Dead Poets Society)或《窈窕奶爸》(Mrs. Doubtfire)。我比他們都早，是通過《默克與明蒂》(Mork and Mindy)電視劇和一張名叫《現實——一個重要的概念》(Reality — What a Concept)的專輯，它令八年級的我興奮不已。
回想起來，威廉姆斯顯然是世上最有爆發力、最令人全神貫注、最令人震驚的語言喜劇大師。能快過他的語速的只有他的思想，他可以把許多荒誕的東西自由自在地聯繫到一起。1979年，珍妮特·馬斯林(Janet Maslin)曾經報道過他的單人喜劇秀，列舉了他一連串的即興小段子，從對雅克·庫斯托(Jacques Cousteau)的印象，到「喜劇迪斯科聖殿里的傳教士」，再到小杜魯門·卡波特(Truman Capote Jr.)在「明星幼兒園裡」（不管它到底是什麼東西）。「他表演《讀者文摘》(Reader』s Digest)上的《根》(Roots)濃縮本，」馬斯林寫道，「一共持續了15秒。他即興表演了一出莎士比亞式的史詩，是關於三里島核事件的，他一個人飾演所有角色，包括愛因斯坦的鬼魂。」（20年後，在史蒂文·斯皮爾伯格[Steven Spielberg]的《人工智能》(A.I.)里，他再現了類似的東西）。
威廉姆斯因《早安，越南》、《死亡詩社》等電影中的角色而獲得奧斯卡提名。
在舞台上，威廉姆斯的速度讓他可以一邊檢驗觀眾的反應，一邊還能在匆忙中調整和改變自己的方向。《進入我的腦子》(Come Inside My Mind)是他一個兩分半鐘的瘋狂絕活，他在其中一邊解釋，一邊表演——「我很棒！我瘋狂地即興表演！不，你沒有，你是個傻瓜！無非就是屎尿屁，什麼內容也沒有！」如果說他通常是一邊表演，一邊自省地評價自己的表演，那麼他的評論通常不是頑皮的，而是真誠的。作為演員，他有時可以放低身段，表現得甜蜜可人——或許他經常這樣做——但是作為娛樂者，他的真正人格中摻雜了需索與慷慨、聰慧與善良，它們格外富於魅力，通常會在意想不到的時候動人心弦。
演完電視劇《默克與明蒂》之後（他還曾在《拉里·桑德斯秀》(The Larry Sanders Show)，乃至最近的《路易不容易》(Louie)等電視節目中亮相），他經常飾演狡黠、悲傷或令人驚訝的角色，都是不同版本的他自己，這樣的羅賓·威廉姆斯們，有的是我們從童年起就熟悉和喜愛的，是我們習以為常，或者有點厭倦的娛樂者。他那些令人難忘的電影角色有着人格的變化——那些瘋狂的、健談的、形體會發生改變的詼諧角色，比如《阿拉丁》里的燈神，以及《早安越南》(Good Morning Vietnam)里反抗權威的電台節目主持人、《漁王》(The Fisher King)里的帕里，甚至還有令人震驚的「窈窕奶爸」。
當然，它們是角色中的角色，而威廉姆斯最精彩的那些嚴肅電影角色——或許我們應該說不那麼傻乎乎的角色，因為他的角色中總是帶着一絲戲謔意味——也都有着類似的雙重性。看着他帶着誠摯所做的那些表演，你忍不住會注意到角色中蘊含的那種生機和頑皮，它們被約束着，你忍不住會想，它們什麼時候會爆發出來，會怎樣爆發出來，或者會不會爆發出來。你完全清楚他的本事，這令他的自控顯得更加精彩。有時你會覺得他自己知道這一點，能裝得一絲不苟，滿臉沉重，裝出理性的談吐，這還讓他覺得挺樂在其中的。
在電影里，他也可以和其他演員一樣安靜、冷酷、剋制地呈現出這一面，傳遞出熱情、嘈雜與瘋狂——就像《鳥籠》(The Birdcage)里的內森·連恩(Nathan Lane)、《無語問蒼天》(Awakenings)里的羅伯特·德尼羅(Robert DeNiro)和《心靈捕手》(Good Will Hunting)里的馬特·達蒙(Matt Damon)。他是個超凡出眾、訓練有素的個性演員，同時也是一個令人無法抗拒，無法忘懷的人，他的聲音——或者說他許許多多的聲音——許多人只要聽到過一次，就永遠不會忘記。
好文選選：是否我們都在扮演另一個人—— 寫於羅賓‧威廉姆斯去世之日
紅肚兜兒 2014年08月12日 17:42
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