Inside Robin Williams' Career and the Massive Kindness He Showed a Young 'Mrs. Doubtfire' Actress

Robin Williams stepped in when a young costar was devastated by her school's decision to expel her, reaching out directly to administration to ask them to reconsider.

"He wrote a letter to my principal saying that he, you know, wanted them to rethink this decision and that I was just trying to pursue my education and my career at the same time and could they please support me in this," Lisa Jakub explained during a May 2024 appearance on the podcast "Brotherly Love."

Williams died by suicide on August 11, 2014, at age 63. An autopsy later revealed that he had Lewy body dementia, which had gone undiagnosed during his lifetime.

Jakub was 14 when she left her Canadian high school to film Mrs. Doubtfire. The plan was to keep up with her studies remotely, but the arrangement eventually fell apart.

"We were going to set up this system, pre-internet, where I'd mail my school work back and forth to the school. We did that for a while," she explained during the podcast reunion.

The school eventually informed her that the arrangement was no longer viable.

"We were a couple of months into filming, and my school in Canada sent a note saying, 'This isn't working for us anymore. Don't come back,'" she added.

Williams noticed Jakub was upset and asked what was wrong. After hearing about the school's decision, he decided to intervene. The actress remembered the request Williams made, "Would they work with me in trying to balance my education and my career?"

The correspondence did not have the intended effect. "This principal got the letter, framed the letter, put it up in the office, and didn't ask me to come back," Jakub remarked. "Amazing."

During the same May 2024 reunion, Jakub discussed how working opposite Williams challenged her approach to performing.

"I had been working for a decade when I started Doubtfire, but we had always used a script, right, so I knew when it was my turn to speak and I could say my line," she explained.

Williams' improvisational style pushed her to listen and respond in the moment rather than rely solely on the script.

"And all of a sudden you know we're on set and you're like, 'I am so lost,' but you know you're just going to go with it," she added, "because he's Robin and you can trust him."

In a May 2021 interview, Jakub reflected on why Williams' kindness had stayed with her.

"What I love about that story [writing the principal] and what I love about Robin, it's just the fact that he would do that for someone, that he would go out of his way, that he would take the time to realize that this would be important," she said.

"I don't know if he ever knew how massive that was and how much I felt like he was in my corner," she added.