A Life in Ten Pictures review: Plenty of sadness, but Robin Williams’ warmth and laughter dominate

I know people of my own age and older who genuinely cannot understand why the murder of John Lennon in 1980 or the death from cancer of David Bowie in 2016 left many of us feeling like a hole had been punched in our lives.

They say something stupid like: “It’s not as if you knew them personally.”

The death of Robin Williams, the subject of this week’s episode of A Life in Ten Pictures (BBC Two, Thursday, April 4, 9pm), was of a similar magnitude.

Is there anyone alive who didn’t like the man — or at least only anyone who had a deep aversion to him in the same way that, say, I have a deep aversion to Jerry Lewis?

If you’ve seen the HBO documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, or read Dave Itzkoff’s definitive biography Robin, whose final chapters are achingly, almost unbearably sad, there’s unlikely to be anything here you didn’t already know.

Where the programme excels is in the quality of the contributors: family, friends, people who worked with Williams

Where the programme excels is in the quality of the contributors: family, friends, people who worked with Williams. Each of them provides a link to one or more of the photographs. Everyone here clearly adored the man, as much as the public did.

His older half brother, McLaurin Smith Williams looks at a photo, taken in 1955, of the four-year-old Robin (the eyes, blue and alert, are unmistakable) with their mother.

She was an inveterate practical joker, says McLaurin, who later reveals that her bullying masked a lifelong struggle with depression. “Depression is in our family,” he adds.

The Williams family lived in a wealthy suburb in Chicago. With no other children his age in the neighbourhood to play with, Robin, a quiet kid, spent his time playing with his huge collection of toy soldiers and watching television.

More than just watching, actually; he absorbed TV, imitating the voices of the people and characters on screen, honing his gift for mimicry, which would be one of his trademarks.

Williams bagged a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School in New York.

“Robin was completely fearless,” says Todd Oppenheimer, partner in a mime act they did in Central Park. “There were no limits. Socially he was a handful. It was impossible to have a straight conversation with him.”

This didn’t endear him to some of his fellow students, so he dropped out and headed to San Francisco in 1978 to perform in an improv group.

This was where he met his first wife, Valerie, who caught his act in a bar during a break from the show she was appearing in across the street.

“Oh, my goodness, what beautiful eyes he had,” she says, looking at a photo of the two of them, her own eyes filling with tears.

They divorced in 1988, yet Valerie harbours no bitterness, a comparative rarity in Hollywood celebrity splits.

“He belongs to the world, and I wanted him to have all those experiences,” she says. “It was good. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

The couple’s son Zak has similar warm feelings for his father, even though he saw him at his worst in the grip of drug and alcohol addiction.

When Williams wasn’t performing, says Zak, he was quiet and thoughtful.

Pam Dawber, Williams’ co-star in Mork & Mindy, recalls how he pretended to be Russian when they met.

Working on the show seemed to be a riot of laughs… and cocaine. Nobody, says Dawber, knew about the drug well, until John Belushi died.

Williams had been with Belushi in the Château Marmont a few hours earlier; the news shocked him into getting his own act together, at least until his relapse.

The documentary cycles through the highs and lows of Williams’ life.

The movie breakthrough in 1988’s Good Morning, Vietnam, for which he won an Oscar, the few hits and many misses in the subsequent years, the spells in rehab; the triumphant stand-up comeback after 16 years away from live comedy, and tragically, the triple whammy of Parkinson’s, dementia and depression, that drove him to take his own life at 63.

There’s plenty of sadness here, but it’s the warmth and laughter Williams spread that dominate.

As his manager, David Steinberg says at the end: “No one will ever have brought joy to more people than Robin Williams.”