Get your tissues out folks, because this one is a tearjerker. Jurassic Park star Sam Neill has just released his memoir Did I Ever Tell You This about his time in the movie industry, taking us through his long career, the friends he made along the way, and his personal struggles – including his recent battle with stage three blood cancer (which he thankfully seems to have beaten).
One of the most heart-wrenching revelations (via Deadline) centers on the much-missed Robin Williams, who took his own life at the age of 63 in 2014 while suffering from debilitating Lewy body dementia that made it impossible to perform as he once did.
Neill worked with Williams on 1999’s Bicentennial Man, and singles their friendship out as something special. The pair would visit each other’s trailers, with Neill saying “We would talk about this and that, sometimes even about the work we were about to do” and describing his co-star as “irresistibly, outrageously, irrepressibly, gigantically funny.”
But there was a dark side to Williams, with Neill summing him up as “The saddest person I ever met.”
“He had fame, he was rich, people loved him, great kids—the world was his oyster. And yet I felt more sorry for him than I can express. He was the loneliest man on a lonely planet … inconsolably solitary and deeply depressed.”
Neill believes that Williams used his comedic abilities as a form of therapy for himself, saying that “funny stuff just poured out of him,” and that he was only truly happy when making other people laugh: “everybody was in stitches, and when everybody was in stitches, you could see Robin was happy.”
Fortunately, Neill doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. He has four movies due out soon, including The Portable Door, The Assassin Club, Scarygirl and Bring Him to Me, as well as a role in Peacock limited series Apples Never Fall. Beyond that, he’s a must-follow on social media, posting daily updates from his New Zealand farm of him caring for his adorable animals.