Robin Williams

Robin Williams's acting is argued in the archive through a persona rather than film by film. What made him famous, for Kevin Maher, was an altruistic adult-child personality, first a hit in a television series, then worked through films like Dead Poets Society, The Fisher King and Jumanji, until Maher can speak of the archetypal Robin Williams vehicle as a settled genre. Mike Higgins takes the android of Bicentennial Man for his positronic likeness outright: the stocky body, the unresting eyebrows, the grin set into a metal mask. For Higgins his presence has long guaranteed films a sticky sentimentality. Two texts record the departures. Peter Matthews says that in Jakob the Liar he reined in the usual mournful clowning and gave an inward, impressive performance; in One Hour Photo he managed to make his bear-like frame look small, Matthews writes, but his mannerisms send the wrong signals.