The actor admitted he also struggled with cocaine abuse in the early 1980s while starring in the sitcom Mork and Mindy, but quit cold turkey after his friend John Belushi’s fatal overdose in 1982.
“Cocaine for me was a place to hide,” Williams told People in 1988. “Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down. Sometimes it made me paranoid and impotent, but mostly it just made me withdrawn. And I was so crazy back then — working all day, partying most of the night — I needed an excuse not to talk. I needed quiet times and I used coke to get them.”
A Chicago native, Williams spent time at Juilliard, where he was briefly classmates with Christopher Reeve.
After an appearance on NBC’s Richard Pryor Show, he got his big break, playing the wacky alien Mork in what was supposed to be a one-off guest role on ABC’s Happy Days. “We started rehearsing and I realized that I was in the presence of greatness,” star Henry Winkler recalled on CNN Monday night. “No matter what you said to him, no matter what line you gave to him, he took it in he processed it and it flew out of his mouth never the same way twice and it was incredibly funny every time.”