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Sam Neill has special memories of Robin Williams working with him in 1999’s Bicentennial Man. Neill, 75, looked back on their time together in his new memoir, Have I Ever Told You That?, out March 21.
Neill recalled their “great conversations” during their visits to each other’s trailers.
“We talked about this and that, sometimes even the work we had to do,” he said, calling Williams “irresistible, outrageous, irrepressible, hilariously funny.”
But even in those good times, Neill could sense something was wrong, calling Williams “the saddest person I’ve ever met.”
Williams died by suicide on August 11, 2014 at the age of 63.
“He was famous, he was rich, people loved him, great kids – the world was his oyster. And yet I felt sorry for him more than I can express. He was the loneliest man on a lonely planet,” Neill wrote. Williams appeared “heartbrokenly lonely and deeply depressed.”
Williams used humor as a form of self-medication, Neill theorized, saying “funny stuff just flowed out of him.”
“And they were all sewn up, and when they were all sewn up, you could see that Robin was happy,” Neill said.