It’s with a heavy heart that I’ve cut short my recent blogging hiatus to come back and offer up some special Trivia Tidbits after the sad passing of Robin Williams. Suffering from depression for most of his life it just shows how such an illness can overcome a person. Sadly at age 63 he took his own life. As it’s 2014, here’s 14 ways of shedding some light on a great talent from both ends of the dramatic and comedic scale.



1: Early in his career, Williams told a reporter that he was born in Scotland. His original press releases indeed listed Scotland as his place of birth. He admitted that he was “under the influence” at the time of saying this. He was really born in Chicago.



2: Williams and Robert DeNiro were the last stars to see John Belushi alive, albeit on separate visits to Bungalow #3 of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles that fateful day in March 1982.



3: One week after Christopher Reeve’s tragic horseriding accident, Robin visited him in the hospital. However, he was dressed from head to toe in scrubs, spoke with a Russian accent, and had a surgical mask on. He was acting as if he was a real doctor and did a bunch of wacky antics. After he took off his mask, Reeve stated that, “That was the first time he laughed since the accident!“.



4: He was a very overweight child. As a result, nobody would play with him. He started talking in different voices to entertain himself.



5: Was frequently called up by Steven Spielberg when he was filming “Schindler’s List“. He would put him on speaker phone so he could tell jokes to the cast and crew to cheer them up. He used his character in “Aladdin” most of the time.



6: During the course of recording the voice of Genie in “Aladdin“. Robin improvised so much they had almost 16 hours of material. He also ad-libbed so many of his lines that the movie’s script was turned down for a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award nomination.



7: When “Blame Canada“, a song from “South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut“, was nominated for a Best Song Academy Award, it was Williams who performed the song at the ceremony because the actress who sang the song in the film, Mary Kay Bergman, had committed suicide a few months prior to the awards show.



8: During the making of “Mork & Mindy” in 1978, Williams departed from the scripts and ad libbed so many times and so well, that the producers stop trying to make him stick to the script and deliberately left gaps in the later scripts leaving only “Mork can go off here” in those places so Robin could improvise.



9: He was a huge fan of the video game series “Legend of Zelda” since the first game appeared in 1986, and even named his daughter Zelda, after the eponymous character. Both Robin and Zelda appeared in a commercial for “The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword” in 2011.



10: Notable roles that he nearly got were, unsurprisingly, the role of The Riddler in “Batman Forever” in 1995, which eventually went to Jim Carrey but was also considered for the role of Joe Miller in Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia” in 1993, which went to Denzel Washington.



11: When filming the scene in “Awakenings” where Dr. Sayer (Williams) and the security guards attempt to restrain Leonard (Robert DeNiro), Williams accidentally hit DeNiro in the face with his elbow, breaking De Niro’s nose. De Niro later commented that his nose had been broken before, in the opposite direction, and this injury actually straightened it back out.



12: In “Good Will Hunting“, the scene where Sean (Williams) and Will (Matt Damon) are in his office, and Sean starts talking about his dead wife and her farting antics. These lines were ad-libbed by Robin, which is probably why Damon is laughing so hard. If you watch the scene carefully you can notice the camera shaking, probably due to the cameraman laughing as well.



13: Asked by “Inside The Actors Studio” presenter James Lipton about what he would like to God say when he arrived in heaven, Williams answered that “The concert starts at 5:00. There will be Mozart, Elvis and anyone of your choosing. There’s a seat near the front.”



14: On the night his death was announced to the UK on the BBC News Channel, BBC3 had just broadcast the “Family Guy” episode “Fatman and Robin” where everyone that Peter Griffin touches turns into Robin Williams. In hindsight it has been described as “freakishly weird” timing by UK audiences as Peter Griffin also attempts suicide in this episode. – (I was personally watching this when I heard the news of his death).

So there you have it… 2014 takes yet another talent from our screens and few have been as entertaining as Robin Williams.

Here’s a great early standup routine to remind ourselves how good this man really was. It’s classic Williams at his best… RIP.

(For earlier editions of Trivia Tidbits click here.)