Robin Williams

Born: 21 July 1952
Where: Chicago, Illinois, USA

The sometime stand-up comic is part of the Hollywood firmament - landing an Oscar for his inspirational teacher in Good Will Hunting.

The Academy awarded him the best supporting actor gong for the 1998 film but he has has also been nominated as best actor for The Fisher King, Dead Poets Society and Good Morning Vietnam.

In recent years he has re-invented himself as a villain in Insomnia and One Hour Photo after a series of sacharrine sweet roles threatened to see him typecast.

As an overweight child, Williams was lonely and would try different voices to entertain himself.

He moved to San Francisco when he was 16 and went to school at Larkspur's Redwood High School where he was voted "student least likely to succeed."

Briefly a student of political science, he enrolled at New York's Juillard School, where he was told he was better off striking out on his own as a stand-up comic.

(it was there that he met close friend Christopher Reeve, whom he would support in the final years of his life after he broke his neck in a riding accident).

While performing his free-form improvisation, he was asked to audition for the role of Mork for an episode of the American TV series Happy Days.

The spin-off Mork & Mindy (director Garry Marshall said he was the only alien who auditioned) was a great success and led to Williams' first feature role.

Director Robert Altman cast him as Popeye in the disappointing 1980 version of the cartoon strongman but Williams fared better in The World According To Garp two years later.

Williams' gift for accents was then put to good use as Russian Vladamir Ivanoff in Paul Mazursky's Moscow in 1984.

Less astute choices followed - The Survivors, Club Paradise and Cadillac Man - before Williams landed a best actor Oscar nomination as an irreverent DJ in Good Morning Vietnam.

Next up was the unorthodox prep school teacher for Dead Poets Society (another Oscar nomination) and then the dedicated doctor for Awakenings with Robert De Niro.

In 1991, he landed another Oscar nomination as a mad, medieval scholar in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King.

The same year Steven Spielberg's Hook cast Williams as a grown-up Peter Pan but the result - and Toys the following year - were not his finest moments.

At this time, his best work was to be found in animated feature, particularly the Disney box office smash Aladdin as the ad-libbing genie.

The live-action 1993 comedy hit Mrs Doubtfire, which Williams produced with his wife, enabled Williams to don the guise of a Scottish nanny.

Jumanji saw him sucked into a board game as a child and the he switched styles to play a gay cabaret owner in The Birdcage in 1996.

Roles followed in the Joseph Conrad thriller The Secret Agent and Williams also played Osric in the Kenneth Branagh-directed Hamlet.

In 1997, he landed his first Oscar at the fourth attempt as the mentor of Matt Damon's maths prodigy in Good Will Hunting.

(the same year he was named "funniest man on the planet" by Entertainment Weekly).

He played a doctor whose cure is laughter in Patch Adams and a Jewish shopkeeper who kept morale high through propaganda in Jakob The Liar in 1999.

At this stage - just as his sugary style was beginning to pale - he surprised audiences with a series of show-stealing villainous turns.

In 2002, he played creepy film developer Sy Parrish in One Hour Photo and was Al Pacino's deadly nemesis in the terrific Insomnia.

Recent work includes the voice of Fender in the animated cartoon Robots.