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Williams' great charm and his great weakness are, in the words of director Paul Mazursky, a desperate desire to be wonderful. These days the actor is still effervescent, bubbling with notions and takes. During two brief spells in one afternoon, he is, at each moment in context, Nastassja Kinski, a disco sleaze, a fashion model, Mick Jagger, Ronald Reagan, James Brown, George Bush, David Duke, Margaret Thatcher and Harold Pinter's answering machine ("Hi, this is Harold" -- a long pause -- "Pinter").
Although he still scribbles as many as a dozen comedy premises a week -- "Pope from the Deep South," for instance -- his only stand-up performances these days are unannounced late-night appearances at big-city comedy clubs. Aside from the intrinsic pleasures of stand-up -- making people laugh, being adored by strangers -- what Williams misses about it is the sense it used to give him of middle America's mood. "As you go outside the major cities and get into other places, you go 'Oh' " -- here his voice turns Southern, smirky, menacing -- " 'maybe thangs are a little different than they seem, Mister Smart-Ass Liberal.' You cross the Manson-Nixon Line and 'It ain't that funny, Audi Driver, Mister BMW, Jewish Management.' "
For all his heartfelt leftism -- he performs at a dozen benefits a year, including the annual Comic Relief telethon for the homeless -- Williams is not blind to the particular self-satisfactions of Beverly Hills limousine liberals. "There can be an ain't-we-swell smugness about it that can be oppressive." Although he didn't attend the recent Hollywood benefit for Oxfam America, at which 15% of the beautiful people had a posh dinner, 25% ate only rice and beans, and 60% had rice and water, the very thought of it made him giddy: "And then 20% actually get electrodes attached to their testicles and interrogated. And then at the very end, 7% draw straws and get shot. What effect will it have? For two weeks they'll go, 'Hola, Margarita? No hablos se tacos. Thank you.' "
Williams is equally clear-eyed about his own work in films and his earlier tendency toward shtick. His director on Garp, George Roy Hill, "basically would say, 'Don't improvise. Try something much simpler.' And that was a good thing." After the great success of Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Dead Poets Society (1989), Williams' Hollywood ascendancy seems inevitable. But before those breakthroughs, Williams was just another mortified, covetous, B- list actor. He auditioned for the Charles Grodin role in Midnight Run. And he talked to the producers of Batman about playing the Joker: "I think I was used for bait to get Nicholson."
But Good Morning, Vietnam's success gave him the confidence and clout to star in the riskier Dead Poets Society, and without that film, he says, he wouldn't have been cast in Awakenings: bankability and a reputation for range in three easy steps. But it was serendipity, not five-year-plan calculation. "I haven't orchestrated it. It doesn't seem like I have to do one serious, one comedy, one serious, one comedy. I'm more like a child -- 'That'd be neat!' "