The Safe House - Expositions

He was still every inch the childlike kidder in need of Ritalin, the warp-drive banterer of a thousand voices, the sweaty satirist scathingly on top of the day's events. Robin Williams was on the road for the first time in 15 years, but the gap could have been 15 minutes. The laughter of the crowd filling Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre was beyond convulsive. They howled, they cackled, they clutched their sides. It was clear that Williams, of the restless, gale-force wit, had retained his touch.

The ovations went on and on after the two-hour performance and Williams thought it was a good show. "Last night was the loosest I've been," he says the next day in a downtown hotel. "It's that thing where people are laughing and endorphins are released. It's like a bizarre Prozac that they're on. It's like nitrous oxide."

Whatever it is for his fans, stand-up is pure oxygen for Williams - and such a vital expression of his need to perform that it is hard to imagine how he stayed away so long. One thing that kept him off the road was the realisation that his comic gifts would not necessarily further his ambitions as a movie actor, that to survive in Hollywood, he had to diversify.

"People will go, 'Why can't you do what you do on stage, on film?' And I go, 'Because not many characters allow that,'" Williams says. "Performing live is cathartic, kind of wild. It's this bizarre thing, totally freeing, with no boundaries. And yet movie acting is like a laser: it's very precise. It's very much about creating something different. Changing perceptions."

So it is that the 50-year-old Williams, Academy Award winner, veteran of more than 40 films, the Juilliard-trained actor once christened the "comic laureate of his generation" by Newsweek, is about to wreak havoc on the way the public sees him. In two new movies - Insomnia and One Hour Photo - he plays completely against type, shutting down his eager-to-please persona to portray muted, twisted souls: one a murderer, the other a voyeur.

He's older now, he says, not hungry for the same things. "At the point when you're 50, it's all about making movies that you really find interesting," he says. "Now it's just looking for people you can work with, because you've paid for the house."

Insomnia is a remake of a recent Norwegian thriller, now set in Alaska, with Al Pacino as a grizzled, sleep-deprived, ethically challenged cop and Williams as his quarry, a mild-mannered novelist with a homicidal streak. Christopher Nolan, the film's director, says people hear Williams's name and jump to the wrong conclusion.

"You say he's playing a psychopath and they get the idea of Robin wanting to do Hannibal Lecter," says Nolan, who directed last year's highly regarded Memento. "It's absolutely the opposite. This is Robin playing the most apparently normal guy he's ever played."

The stripping away of affectation is even starker in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo, in which a bland and blond Williams portrays a disturbed photo technician in a mall who fantasises an emotional entanglement with a family whose photos he develops. It may be the most radical Williams transformation of all: think Travis Bickle without the sunny disposition.

The casting was so offbeat that Romanek, writing and directing his first feature, wondered where the star was going to put all his manic energy. "It was always a question," he says. "Can one of the most wildly charismatic human beings on the planet disappear into a role that is uniquely uncharismatic?"

Few wildly charismatic comic actors have had much luck crossing over to dramatic roles in movies. From Jerry Lewis to Jim Carrey, Carol Burnett to Roseanne, the record for funny people trying not to be funny on celluloid has been spotty, to say the least.

Some actors, such as Lily Tomlin and Bill Murray, navigate the terrain from time to time. But no other movie actor of the first rank traverses the path from silly to serious as regularly as Williams.

Some might take issue with his taste: for every intriguing Fisher King or Moscow on the Hudson, for every outrageously funny romp in Aladdin or Good Morning, Vietnam, he pops up in some unconvincing weepy such as Jakob the Liar or What Dreams May Come. Williams says he is willing to admit to his mis-cues. "What was Flubber? A cheque!" he shouts.

Despite lashings from critics, Williams has been resilient over the years, showing an ability to bounce fairly effortlessly from meaty cameo to star turn to juicy character role. The pattern began early in his career, when he parlayed his break-out success as a space alien spewing one-liners on Mork and Mindy into a varied life in the movies.

In the 1980s, he ranged from playing the spinach-eating lead in Robert Altman's Popeye to being the gentle heart of George Roy Hill's ebullient The World According to Garp and the inspirational prep-school teacher in Dead Poets Society. His 1997 Oscar for supporting actor was, after all, for a dramatic role, that of the introverted therapist in Good Will Hunting, one of many medical types he has played.

Ensconced on a sofa in the hotel suite, Williams is coming down from the adrenaline rush of the previous night on stage. He had opted for a comedy tour when a chunk of time opened up in his schedule. "I was like, 'OK, I better go out and earn some money now'."

He has been crisscrossing the US, away from home in San Francisco, where he grew up and where he lives with his wife, Marsha, and their children, Cody, 10, and Zelda, 12; he also has a son, Zachary, 18, by a former marriage. He has a ranch and vineyard in the Napa Valley. "I don't drink, but I sell grapes," he said. "It's like I'm an enabler."

Between shows, Williams is not obliged to be funny. He just can't help himself. It's that inclination that is his most endearing cinematic trait and it is easy to imagine how seductive his compulsion would be on a set. Virtuoso riffs are his trademark, whether he is demonstrating the dance styles of Bob Fosse and Twyla Tharp in The Birdcage or tossing off ad-libs about devilled eggs in a misfire such as Toys.

Good Morning, Vietnam, in which he played Adrian Cronauer, a rebel DJ given to comic flights that infuriate his superiors at US Armed Forces Radio in Saigon, may have used more facets of Williams's talent than any movie he's done. Aside from the animated Aladdin, it is the most fluid distillation of his brilliant stand-up. Williams is intent on not repeating himself too transparently. He turned down an offer to reprise his role in Good Morning, Vietnam, this time as the host of a radio show in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. "It was an interesting idea, but it didn't pay off."

He also turned away all comers on a sequel to Mrs Doubtfire, his 1994 movie about a divorced man who disguises himself as a nanny from Scotland (one of his favourite accents). It was one of the most successful film comedies of all time.

"The thing with Doubtfire was, they kept saying, 'We'll do it again,"' Williams says. "I went, 'No.' What are you going to do? I mean, just to put her in make-up again?"

Suddenly Williams takes on the tone of one of those portentous movie trailers: "She's back. She's got a gun. She's going downtown and this time it's for real. Mrs Rapidfire."

Lately, Williams has been sensing it is time for something new. The only child of a car-industry executive and a homemaker, he grew up in a well-to-do Detroit suburb and later moved to Marin County, north of San Francisco. Though he denies feeling the sting of rejection by reviewers - "It's like Michael Caine said, 'When the critics pay my bills, I will listen to them,"' he says, doing a perfect Caine - he could not have enjoyed the hammering his recent movies have taken.

That may help to explain his journey to the dark side, and to a job with an indie film-maker.

"I met [Williams] in LA for a very brief lunch at the Palm, and he said, 'I want to do your film,'" says Romanek, whose experience before One Hour Photo, made for $US13 million ($24 million), had mostly been directing music videos. "You're not used to that sort of thing right out of the mouth of a movie star."

They both knew the star's presence would up the ante for an unknown director. "It gives him a little more stick," Williams explains. "They'd pump a couple more million into the budget."

As the technician, Sy Parrish, Williams is in almost every frame of One Hour Photo, which is as much a character study as a thriller. The camera follows Parrish from the creepy sanitised mall to his dreary apartment, where he plasters a living-room wall with extra prints of the handsome family with which he has become obsessed. "Everyone has a kind of isolated, envious feeling in them," Williams says. "The hard part as an actor is to find that loneliness, where you're just, not catatonic, but just kind of existing."

Robin Williams, just kind of existing. Now that really does sound like a stretch.

Insomnia opens September 5; One Hour Photo opens November 14.

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