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Mrs. Doubtfire' Star Mara Wilson Remembers Robin Williams
From her official blog
Quote:
He always reminded me a little of my father.
Robin Williams, as I knew him, was warm, gentle, expressive, nurturing, and brilliant. While it can be hard for me to remember filming Doubtfire, I’ve been flooded with memories in the past few days. It’s humbling to know I am one of the few people who was there for these moments, that he’s no longer around to share them.
He was a creator as much as a performer. After one of my friends posted Robin’s “impression of a hot dog” on Facebook, I realized she had no idea that wasn’t in the script. It was supposed to be a monologue where he listed every voice he could do, but he decided to take the ones he’d been given, add more of his own, and just riff for a while. Chris Columbus, our director, would let Robin perform one or two takes with what was written, then do as many more takes as Robin had variations. Sometimes I wonder why they didn’t give him at least partial screenwriting credit.
He was so quick and prolific, coming up with so many lines and bits even though there was no way we could use them all. At the end of the first dinner scene (where I said my most infamous line), he uses chopsticks like antennae to make me smile. That was a reference to a take that didn’t end up in the film, where Robin was supposed to make a speech about his new job boxing and shipping cans, then turn it into a song. He went off book, as always, and before we knew what he was doing, the chopsticks were by his ears and he was freestyle rapping from the point of view of an ant railing against the humans who kept stepping on its friends.
Robin would do anything to make me and the other kids laugh. Those hand puppets that dance alongside the genie in Aladdin‘s ”Friend Like Me”? That must have been his suggestion, because Robin made those in real life. He’d break them out between takes to entertain us between takes. “I don’t like you,” his left hand would say to his right. “You smell like poop!” I would laugh uproariously — I was five, so poop jokes were the height of hilarity — as his right hand yelled back “Well, there’s no toilet paper at my house!” When he saw me watching him work on his laptop during downtime, he played a sound file of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz screeching “You wicked old witch!” When we were filming the petting zoo birthday scene, he fed a pony oats out of his hat, then held it out to me and said, “Wanna wear it?” When we were filming the climactic dinner party scene, he would make his carpet bag bark like a dog under the table, then order it to be quiet. He seemed to know instinctively what we would find funny, and never had to resort to saying anything that was inappropriate for children. He was, after all, a father himself.
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The rest can be read here
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