Shortly Before He Had His First Son, Robin Williams Spoke About Wanting a Family 'Real Bad'
- - Shortly Before He Had His First Son, Robin Williams Spoke About Wanting a Family 'Real Bad'
Virginia ChamleeNovember 20, 2025 at 6:58 AM
0
Ethan Miller/Getty
Robin Williams -
Just before Robin Williams and his wife gave birth to their first child, the comedian and actor waxed poetic about his desire for a family to PEOPLE
"After doing this movie, I want a family—real bad," the comedian and actor told PEOPLE in 1982
He became a father the next year, when his first wife, Valerie Velardi, had their son Zachary "Zak" Williams in 1983
Just before Robin Williams and his wife gave birth to their first child, the comedian and actor waxed poetic about his desire for a family.
Fresh off filming the 1982 movie The World According to Garp, Williams told PEOPLE in a cover story, "After doing this movie, I want a family — real bad. One really good thing about this film was tapping into that, working with all those children ...I'm serious."
The film also gave Williams, a Juilliard grad, a chance to flex his more dramatic acting muscle (he had, up to that point, been most recognized for the sitcom Mork & Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982).
"I look back now and see how lucky I was, after the last hectic years in Hollywood, to have it come along when it did," Williams said of the role. "It was like going from Marvel Comics to Tolstoy. The hero, T.S. Garp, is like another side of me — the nonperforming side. It was a process for me of mentally stripping away, getting back to what I was doing six years ago when I was an acting student at Juilliard."
— sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
People Magazine
1982 PEOPLE cover
As PEOPLE noted in the feature story, Williams had grown up in the Detroit suburbs — in a 30-room mansion set on 20 acres — as the child of a Ford Motor Company executive and his wife.
Solitary but "not unhappy," he grew up calling his parents "Sir" and "Ma'am" and playing for hours with toy armies in the mansion's basement, staging wars and sending soldiers to detention camps. When he was 17, his parents moved to California's Marin County and, during his PEOPLE cover interview, he mentioned he would soon be uprooting to a more quiet life in the Napa Valley.
He had planned, he said, to a year off, "just takin' it real slow."
"It takes that long to build up new material and to get the momentum going again," he said, adding later: "It's so nice up there, cause people don't give a damn about what I do for a living. They're straight-ahead people."
Jim Spellman/WireImage
Robin Williams, daughter Zelda, wife Marcia, son Cody and son Zac at the 3rd Annual Tribeca Film Festival.
The legendary comedian, who died by suicide on Aug. 11, 2014, became a father the next year, when his first wife, Valerie Velardi, had their son Zachary "Zak" Williams in 1983.
After Williams and Velardi's divorce in 1988, he married Marsha Garces the following year. Williams and Garces welcomed daughter Zelda later that same year and son Cody in 1991. Williams and Garces divorced in 2010.
Five years before his death, Williams reflected on how "proud" he was of his kids.
“I’m so proud of them in different ways, but have they always been cherubs? No, but that’s been part of the process,” Williams said on the Today show in 2009. “And am I the ‘world’s greatest dad?’ Not at all, I’m a work-in-progress, but I love them."
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
