14 DAY TRIAL // Actor Robin Williams took his own life last week, hanging himself in his home in Marin County. His publicist and family have said that he had been struggling with depression for a very long time and that it had been made worse when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
However, Williams was also worried about his career, thinking that he couldn’t get proper work anymore and fearing that the risk he took by agreeing to do television would not pay off, a new report suggests.
So, when his comedy with Sarah Michelle Gellar, “The Crazy Ones,” was canceled after just one season, he took it to heart, considering the decision to axe the show a personal failure, a sign that he was “done.”
One insider tells TMZ that the actor was “devastated” by the news that the show had been pulled off air, saying, “My face is all over town [on billboards] and it's all on my back,” as if he should have been the star to save the series.
“We're told the cancellation after only 1 season sent Robin into a tailspin – as one person said, ‘It hit him hard’ – and that's why he entered the Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center last month, not for substance abuse, but for depression,” TMZ continues.
The cancelation of the show took a greater toll on the actor that the Parkinson’s diagnosis, the same media outlet informs. Robin knew he had the disease for 5 months and all doctors he’d seen had been optimistic about the prognosis. “He wouldn't even start to show symptoms for 6 or 7 years,” another insider claims.
That Robin’s depression was made worse by his career and money troubles has been reported before, last week. Several media outlets picked on some of the actor’s older interviews, in which he seemed to complain about being driven to the verge of bankruptcy by his divorce and how he had taken the TV job because he needed “a steady income” and not necessarily because it was something he wanted to do.
Late last week, the actor’s rep issued a denial to these reports, saying that the late Oscar winner was well off enough to not need to work at all ever. All these things he said about money problems were jokes and, with Williams, jokes didn’t always translate well to paper.
A recent estimate of Williams’ net worth puts him at about $50 million (€37.4 million), of which real estate with equity of approximately $25 million (€18.64 million). Not even for an A-lister does that sound like money problems.