Robin Williams Spent Part of His Childhood in Bloomfield Hills

Caption: A young Robin Williams

Robin Williams, 63, has died of an apparent suicide in California, according to Marin County authorities.

Williams, the son of a Lincoln-Mercury executive, spent his childhood years in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

“It was a giant, beautiful old mansion, with a gatehouse, an empty garage with room for 25 cars, barns, and there was a very wonderful old English man, Mr. Williams, who looked after the gardens, “ Williams told the Detroit Free Press in a 1996 interview.

The house was at the corner of Woodward and Long Lake.

“Robin had the entire third floor,” his mother, Laurie Williams, said in a 1993 interview originally published in New York Magazine in 1993. “He put his toy soldiers — he had thousands of them — in those rooms, carefully divided according to period.”

His mother said he acted out battles and created dialogues for the participants.

Williams, who was an only child, looked back on the years in that house fondly.

“We didn’t own it; we just rented it, “ Williams told the Freep. “Then we moved to Chicago, and when we came back to Detroit a few years later, we just lived in an apartment. And it was very different, you know.

“But the first house, it was so wonderful, so peaceful. There was no one for miles around. Only this giant golf course with people named Tad whacking the old ball.”

Williams told the newspaper that he “loved school” — he attended Detroit Country Day School in Birmingham — and was summa cum laude. ”I can’t say it was easy to fit in. I just went out of my way to fit in. It was a private boys school, Detroit Country Day, and I played soccer. I was on the wrestling team. Mr. All-Around, you know?”

In 1991, People magazine reported that the actor’s performance as an inspiring teacher in the movie “Dead Poet’s Society” was based on one of his teachers, John Campbell, who taught Williams history at Detroit Country Day in 1967.

When Robin was 16, his father took early retirement from the auto industry and moved his family to Marin County, California, to a community called Tiburon.

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