Oscar winner Robin Williams, a Chicago native, found dead

Comedian and Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams was found dead of a suspected suicide Monday in Marin County, Calif. He was 63.

“He has been battling severe depression of late. This is a tragic and sudden loss,” his publicist Mara Buxbaum told the Sun-Times’ Bill Zwecker. “The family respectfully asks for their privacy as they grieve during this very difficult time.”

Here is the statement from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department:

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Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, where Mr. Williams had performed since the early ’80s, told the Sun-Times that the comedian “had been fighting depression for so long. … He was very open about depression.”

Masada, who considered Mr. Williams a close friend, theorized that he “was always hiding behind all of his characters because he was not comfortable with himself. He was in pain about it.”

From his breakthrough in the late 1970s as the alien in the hit TV show “Mork and Mindy,” through his standup act and such films as “Good Morning, Vietnam,” the short, barrel-chested Williams ranted and shouted as if just sprung from solitary confinement. Loud, fast, manic, he parodied everyone from John Wayne to Keith Richards, impersonating a Russian immigrant as easily as a pack of Nazi attack dogs.

He was a riot in drag in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” or as a cartoon genie in “Aladdin.” He won his Academy Award in a rare, but equally intense dramatic role, as a teacher in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.”

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He also played for tears in “Awakenings,” “Dead Poets Society” and “What Dreams May Come,” something that led New York Times critic Stephen Holden to once say he dreaded seeing the actor’s “Humpty Dumpty grin and crinkly moist eyes.”

His other film credits included Robert Altman’s “Popeye” (a box office bomb), Paul Mazursky’s “Moscow on the Hudson,” Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” and Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry.”