Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve: The Truth Behind Their Bromance
Updated: Aug 11
Christopher Reeve remembered the moment clearly enough to write it down decades later. The first person he met at Juilliard was, in his words, a short, stocky, long haired fellow from Marin County wearing tie dyed shirts with tracksuit bottoms who talked a mile a minute. That fellow was Robin Williams, and the two of them stayed close for the next 31 years, through fame, through a horse riding accident that changed one of their lives completely, and right up until Reeve's death in 2004. It's a genuinely good story on its own, so it doesn't need the parts that got exaggerated along the way.
The Only Two Students in the Room
Williams and Reeve met in 1973 as the only two students admitted into Juilliard's Advanced Program that year, a small, intensive track run by the director John Houseman. On paper they had almost nothing in common. Williams had come from Claremont Men's College and the College of Marin on the West Coast, while Reeve arrived fresh off a degree at Cornell, already comfortable in the Ivy League world Williams found alien. Williams put it simply years later: "we were totally opposite, him coming from a junior college, me from the hard core Ivy League." They ended up as roommates anyway, and the contrast turned out to be the whole point. Reeve was disciplined and serious about the craft. Williams was, by every account, incapable of sitting still or staying quiet, doing accents and bits between scenes until instructor Michael Kahn started taking him seriously after watching him perform in The Night of the Iguana.
Feeding a Friend Who Had No Money
Money was tight for Williams in those years, tight enough that he later credited Reeve directly with keeping him fed. "Him being such a great friend to me at Juilliard", Williams said in a Reddit AMA decades afterward, "literally feeding me because I don't think I had money for food". Reeve, for his part, remembered a friendship that went past jokes fairly early on. Robin was able to share his real feelings with me, he wrote in his 1998 memoir Still Me, and I always did the same with him. This has remained true for twenty five years. It's an easy detail to skip past, but it's the actual foundation of everything that came after, two very different, mostly broke drama students who genuinely looked out for each other before either of them had any reason to think the other one would ever be famous.
Swooping In on Fridays
Their friendship stayed just as intense once both men had actually made it. Glenn Close, who starred alongside Williams in the 1982 film The World According to Garp, described watching the two of them together during that shoot as something close to a spectacle. On Friday evenings, she said, Reeve would literally swoop in, piloting his own plane, scoop Robin up, and away they'd fly for the weekend, before Reeve swooped back in on Sunday afternoon to deliver Williams back, a little worse for wear. Reeve had been a licensed pilot since his twenties, and Close called the bond between the two men the stuff of legend, a life giving force sustaining them both, decades before either man needed the other to survive something far more serious.
May 27, 1995
Reeve was thrown from his horse, a competition jumper named Eastern Express, during an equestrian event in Culpeper, Virginia on May 27, 1995. The fall fractured his top two vertebrae and severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down and permanently dependent on a ventilator to breathe. In the days after, by Reeve's own account, he reached a point of genuinely wondering whether his life was still worth living, a feeling his wife Dana pulled him back from with a single line: "you're still you, and I love you."
Then, separately, a surgeon walked into his hospital room, scrubbed in and talking in a thick Russian accent, announcing he was there to perform a procedure. It was Williams, in a blue hat and yellow gown, reprising a bit he'd once played in the film Nine Months, and for a moment Reeve had no idea it was even him. "I laughed for the first time since the accident", Reeve wrote, "and I knew then, if I could laugh, I could live". Christopher's son Will Reeve later told the same story from the family's side of it, saying no one was better at showing up with love and the right dose of humor than Robin Williams, and that Robin and his wife Marsha gave the family support they could never fully repay.
What Williams Actually Did, and What He Didn't
A persistent rumor after the accident claimed Williams had personally promised to cover all of Reeve's medical bills. Both men denied it publicly, and it isn't true. What Williams actually did was smaller in scale but real. He bought Reeve a specially adapted van and a generator to keep his ventilator and other equipment running during power outages, became an honorary board member of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, and gave Reeve his first public appearance since the accident by introducing him on stage at the 1996 Academy Awards to a standing ovation. None of that needed a myth to be moving. It's also a decent reminder that Hollywood's press has always had a habit of flattening complicated relationships between men into one tidy headline, whether that's inflating a real friendship into an exaggerated financial rescue, or, in a very different case decades earlier, spending years trying to figure out exactly what to call the quiet, decades-long bond between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who lived together on and off for over a decade and never much cared what anyone made of it.
When he was honoured by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005, the Golden Globes's lifetime achievement award, Williams dedicated it to Reeve
Nine More Years, Lived Differently
Reeve didn't spend the nine years he had left simply attempting to recover. He founded what became the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to push funding toward spinal cord injury and stem cell research, testified before Congress, and kept working in the industry he'd trained for at Juilliard, earning an Emmy for narrating the documentary Without Pity and a Golden Globe nomination for a 1998 television remake of Rear Window, shot almost entirely from a wheelchair. Williams stayed involved through all of it, showing up at fundraisers and staying on as an honorary board member rather than treating the friendship as something that belonged only to their twenties.
Brothers Until the End
Reeve died on October 10, 2004, from cardiac arrest brought on by a systemic infection, at 52. His wife Dana died less than two years later, in March 2006, from lung cancer, leaving the couple's young son Will without either parent. Williams and his wife Marsha stepped in for the boy in the years that followed, a commitment Will later said never wavered. They had a friendship that someone should make a movie about, Will said of his father and Williams, and Robin was dad's best friend, and you show up for your friends. By every account the two men had genuinely thought of each other as brothers since their twenties, not as a media shorthand invented after the fact.
Eighty Seven Bicycles
Williams died by suicide on August 11, 2014, at 63, after a long private struggle with depression that was compounded, doctors later determined, by an undiagnosed form of Lewy body dementia. Glenn Close, reflecting years later for the 2024 documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, put it bluntly: "I always felt that if Chris was still around, Robin would still be alive." It's not something that can be proven either way, but it's a measure of how much weight people who knew both men gave to that friendship, that losing Reeve in 2004 is still talked about as a piece of what Williams lost too.
Williams was an avid cyclist, and after his death his children found themselves with a large personal collection of his bikes. They donated 87 of them to charities and foundations focused on disability, including organizations carrying the Reeve name, a quiet final gesture that tied the two families back together one more time. Reeve had once written that a friendship like theirs, tested by fame and then by tragedy, had remained true for twenty five years. By the time both men were gone, it had held for over four decades in total, longer than either of them probably expected it to when they were two broke kids sharing a room at Juilliard.
Sources
1. Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve's Devoted Friendship Began as Juilliard Roommates, Biography
