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Robin Williams made it up and they kept it

Some of the best lines Robin Williams ever said on film were never written down. He made them up on the spot, and the people behind the camera had the sense to keep them. more

WatchMojo counted down ten of these moments, and the list opens with an accident. In The Birdcage, Williams plays Armand Goldman, a Miami drag club owner who has to act straight while meeting his son's conservative future in-laws. Co-star Hank Azaria says the fall Armand takes with a pot of soup at dinner was real. Williams got back up and carried on, though he nearly broke character while telling his son to go.

Francis Ford Coppola let him loose on Jack, where he plays a boy who ages four times faster than other kids. Coppola told the Christian Science Monitor the easiest thing about working with Robin was "encouraging him to improvise, for he's brilliant." No one knows which lines were his. Once he began to ad-lib, though, it was "screamingly funny."

The Genie in Aladdin may be the best proof. In the recording booth, Williams made a quick "brip" sound for Aladdin's lie, like Pinocchio's nose growing. Animation supervisor Eric Goldberg and his team liked it so much that they drew Pinocchio's face into the movie to match. By some accounts, Williams gave the filmmakers more than 16 hours of unscripted lines.

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In the Aladdin recording booth, a quick sound for a lie became Pinocchio's face on the Genie.

Even a sitcom was fair game. Williams and Billy Crystal happened to be near the Friends set and were asked if they wanted a cameo, and their episode aired the day before their comedy Father's Day opened. Their characters weren't in the script, and the two reportedly made up the whole coffee shop scene. When Matt LeBlanc tossed in a rude line, Crystal snapped, "I'm trying to have a private conversation."

His only Academy Award came from one of his quieter roles, Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting. Early on, Sean remembers sliding his ticket across the table and saying, "Sorry guys, I gotta see about a girl." At the end, Will heads to California to find Skylar and leaves Sean a note saying he had to go see about a girl. The script had Sean say nothing.

A middle-aged adult male wearing a light green zip-up jacket over a light blue collared shirt with small white dots in an indoor setting, possibly a home or office. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Some of the best lines Robin Williams ever said on film were never written down.

Williams reportedly tried a different line on every take. According to Matt Damon, when Williams hit the one now in the movie, Damon grabbed the director, sure they had struck gold. Sean reads the note and says that Will stole his line. Damon's laughter is real in another scene Williams made up, about how Sean's late wife used to fart in her sleep.

It started long before the movies. Williams first played Mork on Happy Days and reportedly won over the network by making up most of Mork's lines, which led to Mork and Mindy. One of the show's writers told Gizmodo the magic was in the small stuff, "a line here and there, a word here and there, a face, a voice."

In Mrs. Doubtfire, Daniel has lost his mask when the social worker drops by, so he shoves his face into a cake and calls it a nightly meringue mask. That much was in the script. The hot studio lights began melting the icing until it dripped into the tea, and Williams ran with it. "I'm melting like a snow cone in Phoenix."

Then there's the line everyone knows, "Good morning, Vietnam." Playing Adrian Cronauer, a real Air Force DJ during the Vietnam War, Williams earned his first Oscar nomination for best actor, and by the filmmakers' account most of the radio bits were his own. People who grew up with him call him a friend who never met them, and they still quote his lines.