Robin Williams found dead in his home in California. Actor, comedian was 63. --- . The Marin County Sheriff’s Office said that a preliminary investigation indicates the cause of death was a suicide due to asphyxia but that an investigation is continuing. His media agent said he had been battling depression. -- Long fueled by an alcohol and cocaine addiction, Mr. Williams was a motormouthed and unpredictable entertainer in whatever medium he was working, whether movies, television, Broadway, or gala performances before Prince Charles of England. “In England, if you commit a crime, the police don’t own a gun and you don’t have a gun,” he told an audience, referring to the tactics of London police toward criminals. “So it’s, ‘Stop . . . or I’ll say stop again.’ ” -- He was a satirist, an Oscar-winning dramatic actor and a mimic of everyone from Carol Channing to Jack Nicholson, from a British actor rendering “Hamlet” to a ghetto tough to Henry Kissinger channeling the morgue-voiced actor Peter Lorre. Mr. Williams delighted in singing Bruce Springsteen filtered through the voice of Elmer Fudd. He once said he took a crash course in Russian and was so good that he fooled real Russians into thinking he was one of them, “or else Czech or Polish.” -- Audiences gravitated to his profane comic riffs on guns, drugs, God and politics. Of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and Hollywood-action-star-turned-California-governor, Mr. Williams equated his branding as a moderate Republican to “a Volvo with a gun rack — you don't see a lot of them.” --- Mr. Williams won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his portrayal of a therapist in “Good Will Hunting” (1997) after having been nominated three times for leading roles, for his portrayal of an irreverent disc jockey in “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987), an inspirational boarding school teacher in “Dead Poets Society” (1989) and a distraught widower in “The Fisher King” (1991). -- As a Hollywood actor, he was almost always compelling but was uneven in his choice of roles, which shifted in the dramatic realm between riveting (“Awakenings”) and maudlin (“Patch Adams”) and in the comic sphere between the adroit crowd pleaser (“Mrs. Doubtfire,” “The Birdcage”) and the thuddingly mediocre (“Night at the Museum”). --- Robin McLaurin Williams was born July 21, 1951, in Chicago and raised in a 30-room mansion in the affluent Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. -- His father, Robert, was a sales executive at Ford Motor Co., and his mother, Laurie, was a former model her son would later call a “Christian Dior scientist.” Each parent brought a much older child from a previous marriage into the family, leaving Robin to play by himself with 2,000 toy soldiers — giving each a different voice. - Read More, Adam Bernstein, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/2014/08/11/a165171c-21aa-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html