(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 27 February 2026 19:45, UK
There aren’t many comedy legends in cinematic history who have been as consistently funny throughout their entire careers, but Robin Williams was a stand-up legend who became a television star, only to dip his toes into movies and become entirely dominant.
He has a catalogue of classics on his resume that is simply overwhelming, and he wasn’t just beloved within the circle of comedians, as there were serious, Oscar-nominated actors who were willing to hail him a genius.
Williams would have been an all-time giant of Hollywood had he never strayed from his comedic roots, but he was also interested in taking on more serious roles. It was only two years after his big screen breakout in Popeye that he starred in the heartfelt dramedy The World According to Garp, which earned Oscar nominations for its co-stars, Glenn Close and John Lithgow, but it wouldn’t be long before he would himself be on the stage accepting trophies.
After receiving ‘Best Actor’ nominations at the Academy Awards for Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, and The Fisher King, Williams finally picked up the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ prize for his amazing performance in Good Will Hunting as an inspirational therapist.
However, not all his more serious efforts panned out quite so well, as misfires like Jack and Patch Adams earned him serious blowback, and although he was always there to own up to his mistakes, a series of box office disappointments in the late ‘90s led him to increasingly take on darker roles.
Few other of the films that he has starred in have been more disturbing than One Hour Photo, in which he plays an obsessive photo development attendant who becomes obsessed with a family that gets their pictures developed.
Previous dramatic works from Williams, such as Good Will Hunting and The Fisher King, still allowed him to have his jovial, heartwarming qualities, but One Hour Photo saw a complete transformation where he played a cold, isolated man who had no idea how to approach even the most basic social interactions. Regardless of the praises he garnered for his role, the film was hit with accusations of plagiarism by the British screenwriter John Wrathall, who claimed it had too many similarities to a short called Magic Moments that he had made five years prior.
An unspoken reality of Hollywood is that these accusations tend to pop up fairly often, barely ever making it to the next stage of the legal process, and while anyone can point out similarities between two projects, it’s much harder to prove that there was ever an intent to steal or an opportunity for someone to have access to the original material. In the case of One Hour Photo, there wasn’t enough proof to suggest that any of the film’s creative team would have ever been exposed to Magic Moments, which essentially made any proposed lawsuit void.
Although it wasn’t the accusations that caused it, the title has remained one of Williams’ most underrated because audiences may have had a hard time seeing him take on such a sinister role. With the benefit of hindsight, One Hour Photo’s examination of how lonely people grow obsessive over what they don’t have now feels far more relevant than it ever did back in 2002.
