Irrfan Khan, one of the finest actors today, said only four words on the phone to me: “Let’s mourn in silence.” I did for a long while. But then, somehow, so many scenes of so many films flashed through my mind. So many moments of tears, laughter, hope and dreams. So much passion that kept whispering: “Carpe diem. Seize the day”... I decided to share them.

As the coroner at the Marin County Sheriff’s office, Tiburon, California, battles out what caused the asphyxiation, hanging or possible suicide of Robin Williams on the night of August 11, let us look into the fascinating contribution of this great actor in our contemporary world of cinema and TV stand-up acts.

THE BRILLIANT MISFIT

We all know of the actor’s affinity to cocaine and alcohol. He openly claimed to be an addict. He kept visiting and revisiting rehab. But the deep magical quality in so many roles he pulled off on screen will remain to haunt us for a long time. Curious or strange as it may seem, if we closely look into the films which spiralled him to stardom, they were mostly about “disorder”. Positive or negative, Williams had always been cast in movies that deal with or provoke the “disorder”, the “abnormal”, the “outsider”. Very much like his own dual self, perhaps, which made the world laugh but found him suffering from chronic depression.

The World According to Garp is about a fatherless child. In Survivors, he is suffering from paranoia. Good Morning Vietnam is about an army radio jockey who becomes a problem for the authorities. Mr Keating of Dead Poets Society is far too radical a teacher. Dr Malcolm Sayer treats retarded patients in Awakenings. In Dead Again, he is a disgraced psychiatrist. In Fisher King, a homeless madman. In Mrs Doubtfire, he is an unemployed dubbing artiste. Good Will Hunting is about a warped mind coming to terms with life. In Jack, he plays a boy suffering from an ageing disease called Werner Syndrome. Is it pure coincidence that all these characters he played absolutely brilliantly were “misfits”?

My first real exposure to Williams was when I had started acting in 1980 with Mrinal Sen’s Chaalchitra. He too started off at almost the same time, being three years older to me. It was his second film in 1980 directed by the celebrated Robert Altman called Popeye, where he plays a sailor in search of his long-lost father. I was absolutely stunned by his comic timing and energy. Here was an actor who swept me away from the classicism of Peter O’Toole or the method of Mr Brando with his sheer ability to transcend hamming into magic.

Years later, when I had already become comfortable in the Bengali arthouse scenario and was rejected by the so-called Tollywood as a misfit, I watched Awakenings. By then, Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) and Al Pacino’s Tony Montana (Scarface) had swept me into a different world of “being behavioural”. I think it was in 1990, somewhere in Los Angeles, I watched one of the first week’s screenings of Penny Marshall’s Awakenings. Here was my most favourite actor, De Niro, working hand-in-glove with Williams. And Williams’s understated, painfully shy Dr Malcolm Sayer took over at a certain point which I do not remember. All I remember was walking out of the hall into the chilly Fall evening, crying for Dr Malcolm Sayer.

HE PULLS IT OFF WITH EASE

I read somewhere that when actor Christopher Reeve was undergoing a spinal surgery where he had very little chance of survival, a man walked into his cubicle with scrubbing gloves and speaking in a Russian accent, saying that he’ll be doing an anal exam. This man was Robin Williams who was a roommate of Reeve at Juilliard! Reeve later said that was the first time he actually believed that he will survive.

My very dear friend and very favourite director Tigmanshu Dhulia tells me on the phone: “Robin was an actor who could portray comic and very serious roles with great ease... roles that required physical engineering. One of the best of our times.” Tigmanshu puts it very simply: “Ease”. Each time you see Williams on screen, it never feels he has laboured or worked hard. He pulls it off with such ease that you refuse to believe that he was actually working. I have tried to do that so many times, have seen actors who try to do it over and over again. But very few succeed. With most it seems like “so much hard work has gone behind it, so let’s clap”. Yet, “ease” is the final word. Believe me, after watching Awakenings I tried to be at ease with my forthcoming work. I was a disaster on the sets. It took Rituparno Ghosh in 2011, during the shoot of Chitrangada, to tell me: “That you are not trying to act is working”. How could I tell the man: “Bro, I’m working my ass off. I just don’t want anyone to notice it.”

What I am trying to convey readers, is that for many actors like us who never went to a genuine acting school, it was folks like Williams on VHS and later DVD who taught us the intrinsic tricks of the trade. Whether performers like me managed to inculcate them is a different matter, but the lessons were from the screen.

Pratim D. Gupta, the director of my forthcoming assignment, tells me: “I think we have a tendency to brand actors as comic genius, tragedy queen, action star, so on and so forth. And Robin Williams was perceived as this man who could make anybody laugh and ‘patch’ all our problems on screen. But he was much beyond. He was simply a fantastic actor. Period. If you look at the creepy madman he played in One Hour Photo or Insomnia, you fathom the range of his craft.”

I would go a step further and add that the industry actually underrated him by labelling him as the “funny man”. Perhaps also because he did choose a lot of woefully slurpy, very ordinary movies and directors. But whenever he was cast in a serious role that straightjacketed his comic flair, he sprung surprises. The safety net gone, he came out with harrowingly emotional stuff. And if you carefully look into these portrayals you will notice he gave us cues why the “funnyman” ticks. They were as close we can get to his autobiography.

SO SIMPLE, UNCOMPLICATED

Neel Dutt, my son and your music director, says: “The untimely death of Robin Williams reminds me of The Birdcage when Armand (Williams) says: ‘Albert, so what if you’ve pierced the toast? It’s not the end of your life!’ John Keating will live as long as there is cinema.”

Williams’s greatness was perhaps his generosity as an actor. A very rare commodity in Hollywood. In the 1996 film The Birdcage, despite being a far greater comedian, Williams takes on the “straight man”, and allows Nathan Lane to do the uproarious, thereby becoming the stable, more responsible one in the “homely, lived-in gay relationship”, rarely seen on screen before, even after.

In the 1997 film Good Will Hunting which finally got him the Oscar, he had two major scenes. In the park bench scene, he was almost off the camera continuously talking to a silent Will (Matt Damon). In the climax scene where his Sean raises the topic of the horrifying violence his patient Will was subjected to, Williams just has four words which he keeps repeating, “It’s not your fault”. We all cry each time we watch this scene which could have become a huge melodrama, but which Williams makes so simple, uncomplicated.

Born in 1951 in Chicago, the son of a Ford executive, Williams managed to get a full scholarship at Juilliard School of acting in New York City. Presumably since 1982 he fell into drugs and alcohol, broke marriage, remarried, had two children, underwent an open-heart surgery and ended up acting in World’s Greatest Dad (2009) — the story of a schoolteacher whose son hates him and dies of accidental asphyxiation, which Williams fakes into a suicide and also fakes a journal written by him which turns the son into a cult… this is going to be a very hard-to-watch film now.

My favourite colleague Victor Banerjee feels: “He was an unparalleled genius with an overload of compassion that makes it difficult to live in a world where there is so much senseless violence and apathy towards the poor and the starving. Unable to face the misery, he now rests in peace. Amen.”

My best friend Puran, a pub owner in Darjeeling, says: “He is one of the very few actors who made it big on TV, then bigger on the big screen.We laughed and cried with Mrs Doubtfire. I am sure he’ll make many laugh up there too.”

My wife Chanda Dutt tells me: “Do you remember what he once said? ‘You’re given one little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it’.”

My one-time boss and co-actor Dhritiman Chaterji tells me: “The life and extraordinary career of Robin Williams, with their highs and lows, represent the agony and ecstasy of every creative person. His untimely death makes you realise, with unnerving clarity, it could have been me.”

Rated correctly or highly underrated, Robin Williams’s Mr Keating in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society will always remain a milestone in the craft for me. Whenever I feel down, manipulated, out of motivating work, I watch this film. One of the students in the film, Neil, kills himself since his dad refuses to allow him to be an actor. I confess today, that I too locked myself in the bath and thought of doing something stupid when my parents couldn’t understand my desperate desire to act. I did not do the stupid. And each time I hear Williams’s Keating whisper to his students: “The powerful play goes on and you have to contribute a verse”— I think of that desperate night in the bath and feel blessed for becoming whatever I have become.

I don’t know why Robin Williams tied a knot round his neck or tried to cut himself with a pocket knife, found near his body. But this I know, whenever his name is mentioned, I don’t mind standing up on my table to say... “O Captain, my Captain!”