His California classmates voted him the funniest — and least likely to succeed.
Robin Williams proved them right. Then he proved them wrong.
After studying at Manhattan’s famed Juilliard, then hitting the comedy circuit, where he was spotted by a television producer, Williams got his big break during an audition for ABC’s “Mork and Mindy,” a “Happy Days” spinoff.
The show’s producers had turned down nearly 50 performers for the role before Williams showed up.
“About 5 o’clock, in walked this boy with rainbow suspenders,” producer Jerry Paris told the New York Times.
“When he sat down, I asked if he would sit a little differently, the way an alien might. Immediately, he sat on his head. We hired him.”
Williams, 63, who shocked the entertainment world by committing suicide Monday, had been turning the industry upside down ever since.
Whether as a cartooned wish granter in Disney’s “Aladdin,” or a creepy discount store clerk in “One Hour Photo,” or a cross-dressing divorced dad in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Williams squeezed more out of a career than anyone could imagine.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
Born Robin McLaurin Williams on July 21, 1951, in Chicago, the future funnyman was raised in a 30-room mansion in the affluent Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
My aunt took this picture of @robinwilliams in 1979 street preforming in NYC. Who would have guessed. pic.twitter.com/MwK99ADcRo
— Ryan Haught (@thathaughtguy) December 20, 2013
His father, Robert, was a sales executive at Ford Motor Co., and his mother, Laurie, was a former model.
Each parent brought along a much older child from a previous marriage, leaving young Robin to play by himself with 2,000 toy soldiers — each of which he gave a different voice.
Lonely and in need of affection, Robin developed a sharp humor to attract his parents’ attention.
Robin got a breakthrough when he was watching TV with his father one day and comic icon Jonathan Winters came on joking about hunting for squirrels and aiming for their nuts.
“My dad and I lost it,” Williams wrote in a tribute to Winters, who died last year. “Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, `Who is this guy and what’s he on?’”
The comedy bug that bit him got him all the way to Juilliard, where he studied with the legendary John Houseman and was classmates with Christopher Reeve, William Hurt and Mandy Patinkin.
He left in his third year to work in comedy clubs in San Francisco and, in 1978, married Valerie Velardi, a dancer.
They had a son before divorcing.
He married his son’s nanny, Marsha Garces, in 1989 and had two children with her before they divorced.
Williams is survived by his third wife, graphic designer Susan Schneider, whom he wed in 2011.
Along with Williams’ meteoric success in films like “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Good Will Hunting,” for which he won an Academy Award, came several personal setbacks including bouts with drugs, alcohol and depression.
“Cocaine is God’s way of saying that you’re making too much money,” he once joked.
Among his most notable drug episodes was being at the Chateau Marmont with John Belushi hours before the comedian died of an overdose in 1982.
Williams said he was sober for decades after that before drinking again while filming a movie in Alaska in the early 2000s, and he again checked himself into rehab.
“It escalated so quickly,” Williams told Parade magazine. “Within a week, I was buying so many bottles, I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street. I knew it was really bad one Thanksgiving when I was so drunk, they had to take me upstairs.”
Money woes soon followed, residue, he said, from his two failed marriages. The financial fallout forced him to take roles he might not have otherwise considered, including a TV sitcom that was canceled after just one year.
“The idea of having a steady job is appealing,” he said before the show launched. “Divorce is expensive. I used to joke they were going to call it ‘all the money,’ but they changed it to ‘alimony.’ It’s ripping your heart out through your wallet.”
Williams was later beset by depression and health problems, including open-heart surgery in 2009 to replace his aortic valve. The operation forced him to change his fast-paced lifestyle.
In his tribute to Winters, Williams may have offered a hint at his own personal struggles.
“Even in his later years, he exorcised his demons in public,” Williams wrote of his mentor. “His car had handicap plates. He once parked in a blue lane and a woman approached him and said, ‘You don’t look handicapped to me.’
“Jonathan said, ‘Madam, can you see inside my mind?’”