In 1993, Sally Field was in a camper outside the courtroom set of Mrs. Doubtfire, about to shoot the film’s custody hearing scene, where the court pulls Robin Williams‘ character away from his kids. Her father had suffered a stroke a couple of years earlier and was living in a nursing facility. While she waited to film, the phone rang. It was the doctor. Her father had suffered a massive stroke, and he was asking whether she wanted him resuscitated.
As Field recounted to Vanity Fair in its retrospective marking 10 years since Williams’ death, she already knew the answer. Her father hadn’t wanted that.
“I said, ‘No, he did not want that. Just let him go,’” she recalled. “And please lean down and say, ‘Sally says goodbye.’”
Then she hung up the phone in the camper on a comedy set, having just let her father die, and decided she was going to do the scene anyway.
She couldn’t. Not because she broke down, but the opposite: She’d gone so numb that she couldn’t produce the emotion the scene needed. She couldn’t cry on cue for a courtroom about to lose custody of its children while her own father had just died a few hundred miles south. That flatness is what gave her away.
Williams, who by every account read a room better than he let on, noticed that something was wrong before she’d said anything and pulled her aside to ask. When she told him, his response was immediate. “Oh my God, we need to get you out of here right now,” he said.
What he did next is the part that stayed with her for three decades before she told anyone. He didn’t just offer sympathy and let the machine grind on. He turned to the entire set and shut the day down.
“That’s it for the day, guys. We’re wrapped here,” Field remembered him announcing. “You can get a few shots of the kids and maybe one of Mrs. Doubtfire, but Ms. Field’s going home.”
He had director Chris Columbus reorder the schedule so the production could shoot around her for the rest of the day. That meant she could go home, call her brother, and make the arrangements a person needs to make when a parent dies instead of hitting her marks.
“It’s a side of Robin that people rarely knew,” she said. “He was very sensitive and intuitive.”
If that sounds like a one-off, it wasn’t. It was apparently just how Williams operated on that particular set, especially with people who were quietly falling apart.
Mara Wilson, who played the youngest Mrs. Doubtfire kid, was 9 and had recently lost her own mother. She’s said that at a table read for What Dreams May Come not long after, Williams came over and gently asked how she and her family were doing, without once raising anything that might hurt to hear.
Lisa Jakub, who played the eldest daughter, was expelled from her high school for taking time off to shoot the movie, and Williams wrote her principal a letter asking the school to reconsider and support a kid trying to balance school and work. The principal framed the letter and hung it in the office. Jakub has also said Williams was one of the first adults to talk to her honestly about his own mental health, which, given how his story ended, lands even more powerfully now than it did then.
The man who kept noticing other people’s pain across a chaotic comedy set and moving to lift it before they even asked was carrying a great deal of his own. Field kept the story to herself until the 10-year mark. When she finally told it, it wasn’t about the tragedy of the phone call. It was about the man who saw her face and knew.
