Robin Williams

📍Tiburon, California, USA

“I spent most of my childhood in a huge house in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit, where my father was an executive with Ford. He was often away, and my mother was busy with her social life, so I was a lonely, chubby kid who spent hours in the attic with thousands of toy soldiers, inventing battles and voices. I was shy at school and was teased, and I discovered that making people laugh was the quickest way to be liked. My mother's own sense of humour, and her love of a good joke, showed me what comedy could do. When I was sixteen, my father took early retirement and we moved to California, settling in Tiburon in Marin County, on the hills above San Francisco Bay. It was 1968, and Marin was another world: relaxed, colourful and wide open. At Redwood High School in nearby Larkspur, nobody cared that I'd been the new kid in a blazer. I joined the drama club and the cross-country team, loosened up, and found that being odd and quick-witted was something to celebrate. My classmates voted me Funniest and, more famously, Most Likely Not to Succeed. After graduating in 1969 I studied at Claremont, then came back to the College of Marin, where playing Fagin in Oliver! convinced my drama teacher that I was a real actor. From there I went to Juilliard, the comedy clubs and Mork & Mindy. The Bay Area stayed home for the rest of my life. I lived around it, rode my bike over its hills, dropped in unannounced at local comedy clubs, and always remembered that it was in Tiburon that the lonely boy from the attic finally found his voice.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Robin Williams Wikipedia: Redwood High School (Larkspur,_California) historydraft.com pacificsun.com