During filming, [Robin Williams] visited children's wards in San Francisco with the real Patch Adams, who in the early 1970s turned his house into a 24-hour hospital to provide free care for people without medical insurance. "I saw him improvising with a 14-year-old kid who had Down's syndrome. He and this kid were just riffing like crazy. The parents were in stitches. Nurses said that it had an effect for weeks afterwards," says Williams.

Critics such as [Roger Ebert] keep advising Williams he should stick to being the brilliantly audacious stand-up comic he started out as. They've never really accepted him as a serious actor. If he confronts serious issues with humour and compassion, they accuse him of sentimentality. To which he retorts: "Laughing is better than a diatribe. With comedy you can pull people in and say, look at some of these things in the fun-house mirror - but really look at them." To Williams, laughter has always been the natural voice of despair. He grew up a lonely child, terrified of being abandoned by his parents. His part-Irish father was a top executive at Ford who was rarely at home and his mother was a society beauty from New Orleans, busy with her charities. Williams had a whole floor of their 30-room mansion outside Detroit alone to himself and his imaginary friends. Comedy became a way of connecting with his mother ("I'd think, I'll make mommy laugh and that will be okay"). At school he was picked on because he was small and fat and too well-spoken ("I started telling jokes as a way to stop getting the shit kicked out of me").

Although born rich, Williams has always been an outsider with an urge to be accepted. Like Patch, who never fitted in at medical school - he was cautioned for his "excessive happiness" and banned from wards - Williams too was a mature student of 22 when he went to Julliard. He was told he was doing everything wrong. That he was too intuitive, talked too fast, swallowed his words. "They were trying to mould him into a standardised Julliard product," recalled room-mate [Christopher Reeve]. "But Robin was too special, too original, to be that."