Like many other great stand ups who were also fine dramatic actors， Williams dove into darkness in many of his best roles. He never seemed to be having to imagine his way into the 19）mindset of people who had 20）numbed themselves with chaos （like his character in The Fisher King， who lost his wife in a random shooting and became convinced he was a knight on a holy quest） or routine （like the 21）meek doctor in Awakenings， or the title character in The World According to Garp， whose opening credits song， “When I’m 64”， will pierce more deeply now）.
Despite Garp， a lovely adaptation of a book some thought unadaptable， it took a while for him to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor， and an equally long time for one of his films to hit big. He crossed both achievements off his list after 1987’s Good Morning Vietnam. The film was the perfect merger of formulaic Hollywood comedy-drama beats and Williams’by-then-22）patented brand of 23）riffing.
Vietnam was so successful that Williams strove to recapture it throughout the next decade， in a series of comedies that cast him as a grinning id figure sent to liberate the world from its psychic shackles. The best of these were Dead Poets Society， which transplanted his standupstyle riffing to the English classroom in a 1950s prep school filled with repressed young men who had to be instructed to seize the day； and Disney’s cartoon feature Aladdin， which arguably put Williams， 24）at long last， in the role he was born to play： a purple genie that re-formed itself to incarnate any person， creature or concept Williams’ 25）motor-mouth could 26）invoke.
For a long stretch， Williams alternated 27）Holy Fool roles with comic liberator parts （combining the two in his ’90s 28）nadir， Patch Adams， about a doctor who believed laughter was not just the best medicine， but a substitute for actual medicine）. Occasionally he’d 29）toss in a heavymakeup 30）tour-de-force like Mrs. Doubtfire， but for a while there was a growing sense that Williams’ instincts had become too calculated and the material too transparent.
His secret career salvation came in in 1990’s Awakenings， in which he played a soft-spoken， emotionally recessive psychologist opposite a much showier Robert DeNiro as a 31）comatose patient made 32）lucid by medicine. Williams had been a comic leading man with a dramatic streak for over a decade at that point， but one could glimpse a possible third act in his career， as a character actor.
He became a very good one soon afterward， proving himself in roles that seemed ill-suited to the alien in the bright shiny jumpsuit on Mork& Mindy who， upon learning that eggs were 33）unhatched baby birds， tossed one in the air， exclaiming， “Fly！ Be free！”
He won his only Oscar as a supporting player， in 1997’s Good Will Hunting， playing a community college professor 34）moonlighting as a therapist 35）at the request of an old college roommate.
A lot of people mock Hunting as a Hollywood 36）bastardization of therapy， in which a troubled character （Matt Damon’s janitor/math genius/ orphan） finally starts to overcome 37）crippling self-doubt and class resentment. There’s some truth to the criticism， and yet the film still works—not just because of Damon and Ben Affleck’s ambitiously multilayered script and Gus van Sant’s precise direction， but because the central relationship between the hero and Williams’s Sean Maguire， who understands Will’s pain because he lost his wife to cancer， feels raw and true.