Robin Williams

American actor and comedian whose four decades of work in stand-up, film, and television — Mork & Mindy, Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Patch Adams — made him one of the most beloved cultural figures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in 1951 in Chicago, he won the Academy Award for Good Will Hunting, six Golden Globes, and four Grammy Awards. His characters — Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society ('Carpe diem'), Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting ('It's not your fault'), the Genie in Aladdin — became vehicles for some of the most-shared lines of contemporary moral imagination. He died by suicide in 2014 after a long struggle with Lewy body dementia, and his words on kindness, weirdness, and the depth of being human remain widely quoted.