Robin Williams wrote letter to ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ child star’s school after she was expelled for making the film

Lisa Jakub, who played Lydia Hillard in the classic 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire, recently appeared on a podcast to reflect on her experiences as a child star. During the podcast, Jakub revealed that Robin Williams, who played her father in the film, once wrote a letter to her high school to persuade them to overturn her expulsion. Jakub, who is Canadian, had been attending school in Canada but had to take time off to film the movie. Despite setting up a system to send her schoolwork back and forth between the school and the movie set, her school eventually became fed up and told her not to return. “I was devastated,” Jakub recalled.

Williams saw that Jakub was upset, so he asked what was wrong. When she explained the situation, Williams wrote a letter to Jakub’s principal arguing that she was trying to pursue her education and her career at the same time. He asked the principal to reconsider their decision and support Jakub. The principal was so moved by the letter that they framed it and put it up in their office. They never asked Jakub to come back to the school. “Amazing,” Jakub said.

tells the story of a father who decides to dress up as a female housekeeper so he can spend time with his children, from whom he is separated from his ex-wife. The movie was a smash hit, grossing $441 million worldwide and finishing 1993 as the second biggest film of the year. Plans for a sequel were discussed in the early 2010s, but were ultimately scrapped following Williams’s suicide in 2014. Williams suffered from Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disorder that had been misdiagnosed.

Williams’s death was a massive loss for the entertainment industry, as he was one of its most beloved figures. At the Kennedy Center Honors at the end of 2023, Williams’s close friends and colleagues Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal paid tribute to him. “I want to acknowledge the person who should also be standing here with me is our brother Robin,” Goldberg said as she gestured to the empty space beside her. Crystal echoed her sentiments: “I’m really feeling I’m missing my friend Robin tonight, very much so, because of all of what we did together.”

Recently, Glenn Close speculated that Williams would still be alive if his friend Christopher Reeve hadn’t passed away in 2004. Close says that Williams was never the same after the death of his friend, who had become paralyzed after a horse-riding accident

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