Alcoholism saw actor lose gifts that made him a star

Friends say Robin Williams began to lose the gifts that made him a star when he began drinking again in 2003.

“Quite often when he opens his mouth, a slur of unrelated words come out, like a dozen different false starts tangled together, from which an actual sentence eventually finds its way out. It’s like trying to tune into a long-wave radio station,” The Guardian reported in 2010.

Williams had been 20 years sober up to 2003. Following years of cocaine and alcohol abuse, he went cold turkey after the death of his friend John Belushi and before the birth of his son, Zachery.

Belushi overdosed on a speedball of cocaine and heroin at LA’s infamous Chateau Marmont hotel in 1982 following a night out with Williams and Robert De Niro.

“I didn’t have to join a group. Zach was about to be born and I didn’t want to miss it because I was coked up or drinking. It was hideous enough feeling hungover, without a baby screaming. I mean, there are times when you think, ‘God made babies cute so you don’t eat them’, imagine if you’re loaded.” he said in 1994.

“The Belushi tragedy was frightening,” Williams told People magazine. “His death scared a whole group of showbusiness people. It caused a big exodus from drugs. And for me, there was the baby coming. I knew I couldn’t be a father and live that sort of life.”

Zachery was his first and only child from his first marriage to Valerie Velardi. The couple were married for 10 years and divorced in 1988.

In 1986, Williams was sued by a mistress whom he infected with herpes. He was ordered to pay the woman, a cocktail waitress, $6.7m in damages.

The star then married Zachery’s nanny, Marsha Garces, in early 1989 when Garces was pregnant with his second child, Zelda.

The couple welcomed Cody, Williams’s third child, in 1991. They also worked together on many of Williams’s films in the 1990s; Garces produced 1993’s Mrs Doubtfire.

After 19 years together, Williams and Garces divorced in 2008. His relapse with alcohol while shooting on location in Alaska in 2003 was the beginning of the end for the couple and for his long-term sobriety.

His family intervened and he sought professional help for alcoholism in 2006.

Following his treatment, his second divorce was finalised. Both marriage breakdowns cost him over $20m in settlements.

“Divorce is expensive. I used to joke they were going to call it ‘all the money’, but they changed it to ‘alimony’. It’s ripping your heart out through your wallet. Are things good with my exes? Yes. But do I need that lifestyle? No,” he told Parade magazine in 2013.

In 2011, he married graphic designer Susan Schneider after they met in 2009. Schneider, 48, nursed him back to health after he underwent heart surgery in 2009. They married in front of close friends, including Billy Crystal and George Lucas, in an intimate ceremony in the Napa Valley before honeymooning in Paris.