- Sam Neill wrote about the late Robin Williams in a new memoir, "Did I Ever Tell You This?"
- In his book, Neill wrote that Williams was "gigantically funny" and "the saddest person I ever met."
Actor Sam Neill remembered the late Robin Williams in his memoir, "Did I Ever Tell You This?" released on Tuesday.
In the book, Neill, who worked with Williams on the 1999 sci-fi film "Bicentennial Man," described Williams as "irresistibly, outrageously, irrepressibly, gigantically funny" and also "the saddest person I ever met," according to Deadline.
Williams died by suicide in August 2014 at age 63.
Neill, 75, reminisced in his memoir about his "great chats" with Williams in their trailers while they filmed "Bicentennial Man."
"We would talk about this and that, sometimes even about the work we were about to do," he wrote, according to Deadline.
Neill shared in the book that Williams seemed "inconsolably solitary and deeply depressed" when the two knew each other.
"He had fame, he was rich, people loved him, great kids — the world was his oyster. And yet I felt more sorry for him than I can express," Neill wrote, according to Deadline. "He was the loneliest man on a lonely planet."
In his memoir, Neill wrote about how Williams found joy through other people's laughter. "Everybody was in stitches, and when everybody was in stitches, you could see Robin was happy," he wrote, according to Deadline.
Experts recommend looking out for warning signs of suicide such as acts and threats of self-harm, and urge people who have suicidal thoughts to seek professional help and call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, in the US.
Prior to his death, Williams was misdiagnosed with Parkinson's disease, CNN reported. According to the outlet, a postmortem brain autopsy revealed that he actually had Lewy body dementia. The National Institute on Aging describes the disease as "associated with abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein in the brain. These deposits, called Lewy bodies, affect chemicals in the brain whose changes, in turn, can lead to problems with thinking, movement, behavior, and mood."
As Insider previously reported, Williams' widow Susan Schneider Williams wrote an essay for the medical journal "Neurology" in 2016, in which she cited the medical professionals who had reviewed her husband's last two years of medical records and brain scans saying his case was "one of the worst LBD pathologies they had seen" and there was "nothing else anyone could have done."
"The massive proliferation of Lewy bodies throughout his brain had done so much damage to neurons and neurotransmitters that in effect, you could say he had chemical warfare in his brain," she wrote.
Williams' son, Zak, said the misdiagnosis left his father "very uncomfortable" and "frustrated" during an interview on Max Lugavere's "The Genius Life" podcast in July 2021.
Neill has been candid about his own health in recent interviews. The actor told The Guardian on March 17 that he is receiving treatment for a blood-cancer diagnosis and is currently in remission. Neill told the outlet that writing his memoir, "Did I Ever Tell You This?" was a "lifesaver."