What was it like to have Robin Williams become Oliver Sacks in the film “Awakenings”?
He’s a wonderfully friendly man, and soon after we met, we went out together. We ate together, went out for a drive and saw a few patients together. I didn’t realize, I just had no idea at that time, that I was the object of the most minute, most microscopic, and devastatingly accurate, observation. Except devastating is the wrong word because everything Robin does builds up, and it constructs from there. When I’m nervous, I get this sort of odd posture, and I realized that Williams was in fact in the same posture. Not because he was imitating me, but because by that point he’d incorporated me, and this had become a natural position for him. He had incorporated my posture as he had incorporated my memories, my hopes, my experiences, my character. It was wonderful and rather frightening, suddenly having this younger twin. And at that point both of us decided that we needed to make some space for him to construct a character out of himself, which he did. In that first stage of acting, pe
