Belgian celebs remember Robin Williams

Both cycling legend Eddy Merckx and film director Stijn Coninx spoke yesterday about their personal relationships with American actor Robin Williams (pictured), whose death on Monday at his home in the San Francisco Bay Area is believed to be a suicide.

“He was a great supporter of Lance Armstrong, so I got to know him during the Tour de France,” Merckx told VRT radio. “On my 60th birthday, he gave me the script for the film Insomnia. I didn’t know him very well, but he was a very agreeable person to spend an evening with.”

Williams, he said, was a “cycling fanatic. “He knew who I was and what I had done. If you’re a cycling fan, the name Merckx means something to you. I cycled with him a few times in America.”

In 2007, Williams autographed an Eddy Merckx sweater for an auction to benefit cancer organisation Kom Op Tegen Kanker. The actor was in Belgium and said in an interview that Merckx was possibly “the greatest rider of all time” and that he was “a great character. I own a couple of his bikes. I love riding with him.”

Coninx, meanwhile, worked with Williams in the 1990s on a film about the life of Father Damiaan, the 19th-century Belgian priest famous for his care of people with leprosy in Hawaii.

Coninx, director of the recent Marina and the Oscar-nominated 1992 film Daens, told VRT radio yesterday that he and Williams had “kept in touch, and I hoped one day to be able to work with him”.

Williams, he said, was a big supporter of the Damiaan project. Coninx, in Los Angeles at the time, was invited by Williams and his wife, a producer, “to start working on a screenplay with Williams in an apartment they owned. I worked there every day for three months. Whenever Robin Williams was around, he was fantastic – very straightforward and very funny. He was trying to be a normal family man with a normal family life. I was very surprised when I found out, but things had not been going well the last few years with him. He seemed to be extremely lonely within his stardom. I’m happy to have known such a fantastic human being.”