# The Lewy Body Diagnosis *A Biography of Robin Williams* — Legendary Biographies No. 154 - **Subject:** Robin McLaurin Williams - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 206 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-130-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-606-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/154-the-lewy-body-diagnosis.html ## About this book August 11, 2014, his Paradise Cay, California home. Robin McLaurin Williams, sixty-three, the comedian whose ad-libbed energy had defined American comedy for forty years, hangs himself in his bedroom. His wife Susan Schneider finds him at 11:45 a.m. The post-mortem will diagnose him with diffuse Lewy body dementia — the most aggressive form of the disease — which had been misdiagnosed in his final months as Parkinson's disease. Donovan Hadley's biography opens earlier — in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where Robin McLaurin Williams was born in 1951 to a Ford-Motor-Company executive — and follows the arc through the Detroit Country Day School and the Marin Country Day School years after the move to Tiburon, the Juilliard years with John Houseman and the long roommate-with-Christopher-Reeve, the Mork & Mindy breakthrough of 1978, the long stand-up career at the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco, the Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society film years, the 1989 Hollywood Bowl benefit for John Belushi's mother, the 1997 Academy Award for Good Will Hunting, the long cocaine and alcohol history of the 1980s and the 2003-2006 relapse, the 2009 open-heart surgery, the Mrs. Doubtfire Broadway musical that opened December 5, 2021 (long after his death), the 2013 Parkinson's misdiagnosis, the Lewy body dementia, and the morning of August 11. What emerges is a portrait of the most beloved American comedian of his generation — and of the late-life neurodegenerative disease the medical literature did not have the diagnostic vocabulary to read in his lifetime. ## Contents 1. Bloomfield Hills 2. Juilliard 3. The Comedy Store 4. Mork 5. Cocaine 6. Good Morning, Vietnam 7. Dead Poets Society 8. Mrs. Doubtfire 9. Good Will Hunting 10. The Relapse 11. The Marriages 12. One Hour Photo 13. The Final Years 14. Lewy Body Disease 15. Susan's Essay 16. August 11, 2014 17. Robin's Wish 18. The Spark 19. Postscript — A Decade After ## Questions **Who is The Lewy Body Diagnosis about?** Robin McLaurin Williams. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Lewy Body Diagnosis — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,860 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 206 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.