A few years before his death, Robin Williams compared celebrity status to drugs.
“I think celebrity itself is a drug,” Williams told Time magazine in 2011. “There’s that whole thing — it comes and goes. And now with tweeting and Facebook, it’s like cybercrack. Withdrawal from celebrity is an interesting thing. You see people going, ‘I’m not as famous. Oh, man, what am I gonna do?’ ‘Steal some jewelry, Lindsay. That helps.'”
Williams was no stranger to the influence of drugs in Hollywood, battling cocaine and alcohol addiction in the 1970s.
“Cocaine for me was a place to hide,” Williams admitted to People in 1988. “Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down. Sometimes it made me paranoid and impotent, but mostly it just made me withdrawn. And I was so crazy back then — working all day, partying most of the night — I needed an excuse not to talk. I needed quiet times and I used coke to get them.”
After almost 20 years of sobriety, the 63-year-old star of “The Crazy Ones” checked into rehab in 2006 when he began drinking again.
When asked if “addiction is the price of fame,” Williams responded: “It’s the price of drugs actually. Most of the time with drugs if you’re famous, they give them to you. It’s good for business to say that they get you high.”
Williams fell off the wagon once again on the set of his CBS show in 2013. He checked in to rehab again in July this year to “fine-tune” his sobriety before taking his own life on Aug. 11.