The Lewy Body Diagnosis

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.