Robin Williams Trivia
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47 free Robin Williams trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Robin Williams trivia questions with answers. Robin Williams went from a San Francisco comedy club called the Holy City Zoo to an alien on Happy Days, and from there to an Oscar, five Grammys and some of the most-loved films of the 1990s. He improvised roughly 30 hours of tape as the Genie, took scale pay to do it, and got a Picasso he hated as an apology when Disney broke the deal. This quiz covers 47 questions across his whole career: the early stand-up and Mork & Mindy, the breakthrough of Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, The Fisher King, Hook, Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, The Birdcage, Good Will Hunting, the dark turn of One Hour Photo and Insomnia, Night at the Museum, and the charity work with Comic Relief and the USO. Easy questions ask which film won him the Academy Award; hard ones ask which classmate shared his Juilliard programme and where he had his heart surgery. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedia entry on the film or the man, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Robin Williams born on July 21, 1951?
Chicago
Chicago was his birthplace, but he finished growing up in California: his father retired when Robin was 16 and moved the family to Marin County, where he found his high school's drama club.
Q 02Williams's father, Robert, was a senior executive at which car company?
Ford
Ford employed Robert Williams as a senior executive; his son spent a lonely boyhood playing mostly by himself in the family's large house, and learned early to use humour to win people over.
Q 03Which future film star was the only other student John Houseman picked for Juilliard's Advanced Program with Robin Williams in 1973?
Christopher Reeve
Christopher Reeve stayed his close friend for life: after Reeve's 1995 riding accident, Williams burst into his hospital room posing as a Russian proctologist and drew his first laugh since the fall.
Q 04Robin Williams began his stand-up career at the Holy City Zoo, a comedy club in which city?
San Francisco
San Francisco's Holy City Zoo let him work his way up from tending bar; he met his first wife, Valerie Velardi, while bartending in the city in 1976.
Q 05Williams was cast as the alien Mork in a 1978 episode of which sitcom, before getting his own spin-off?
Happy Days
Happy Days got its alien after Garry Marshall's son saw Star Wars and asked for a space episode; Mork was written off as Richie's dream, then proved too popular to leave there.
Q 06Mork & Mindy is set in which Colorado city?
Boulder
Boulder is seen for real in the opening titles: before the series began, Williams and Pam Dawber went to the Colorado city to be filmed around its streets.
Q 07Which veteran comedian joined Mork & Mindy's final season as Mearth, the couple's child born looking elderly?
Jonathan Winters
Jonathan Winters, Williams's comedy idol, played Mearth: Orkans age backwards, so the egg Mork laid hatched into a child who already looked elderly.
Q 08Williams's first starring film role was as which comic-strip character, in a 1980 Robert Altman musical?
Popeye
Popeye gave Williams prosthetic forearms and a pipe clamped in his mouth; he mumbled so much around it that much of his dialogue had to be recorded again.
Q 09The Sweethaven set for Williams's 1980 musical was built on which Mediterranean island?
Malta
Malta's Anchor Bay got a whole wooden village for the shoot; instead of being torn down afterwards, the Sweethaven set was left standing and turned into a seaside fun park.
Q 10Williams earned his first Oscar nomination as a real-life Armed Forces Radio DJ in which 1987 film?
Good Morning, Vietnam
Good Morning, Vietnam, directed by Barry Levinson, let Williams improvise most of the radio-broadcast scenes and earned him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.
Q 11Which real Saigon DJ's experiences loosely inspired Williams's 1987 breakthrough film?
Adrian Cronauer
Adrian Cronauer said little of the film matched his life: far from a rebel, he called himself a lifelong card-carrying Republican, and he spent his earnings from the film on law school.
Q 12In Awakenings (1990), Robin Williams's Dr Malcolm Sayer is modelled on which doctor, who wrote the book behind the film?
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks found patients who had spent decades frozen like statues after a sleeping-sickness epidemic; he gave them a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, and wrote the book about their return to life.
Q 13Which Monty Python member directed The Fisher King (1991), with Robin Williams as homeless Parry?
Terry Gilliam
Q 21In the film that won Williams his Oscar, his character teaches psychology at which institution?
Bunker Hill Community College
Bunker Hill Community College is where Sean teaches psychology, far from the MIT chair of his old college roommate, who calls him in only after other therapists have given up on the young genius.
Q 22In which 1998 film does Williams play a real-life doctor who treats patients with humour and compassion?
Patch Adams
Patch Adams began as a patient: Hunter 'Patch' Adams decided to become a doctor while in a mental hospital, and later opened a free clinic for people without insurance.
Q 23Bicentennial Man (1999) is based on a story by which science-fiction author?
Terry Gilliam took the job as a director-for-hire, the first time he had filmed someone else's script, after his own Baron Munchausen ran far over budget.
Q 14In Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), Williams plays a grown-up Peter Pan who has become what?
A lawyer
A lawyer too busy for his own children, Peter Banning has forgotten Neverland entirely until Dustin Hoffman's Hook kidnaps them to lure him back.
Q 15Robin Williams, then earning about $8 million a film, agreed to voice Aladdin's Genie for roughly how much?
$75,000
$75,000 was the union-scale fee he accepted, saying he wanted to leave something wonderful behind for his children, on condition that his voice not be used to sell products.
Q 16Amid the row over Aladdin's marketing, Disney sent Robin Williams a painting by which artist?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso's painting did not end the row; Williams came back as the Genie only after new studio chief Joe Roth apologised in public in 1994.
Q 17Which 1997 remake of The Absent-Minded Professor starred Williams as Professor Philip Brainard?
Flubber
Flubber, the bouncing green goo he invents, so absorbs Williams's Professor Brainard that he misses his own wedding, and not for the first time.
Q 18In Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), which actress plays Miranda, the ex-wife who hires Robin Williams's character without recognising him?
Sally Field
Sally Field played Miranda Hillard in the film of Anne Fine's British novel Madame Doubtfire; the couple never get back together, and the story ends with them sharing the children instead.
Q 19The Birdcage (1996) moved the drag club of La Cage aux Folles from Saint-Tropez to which US city?
Miami Beach
Miami Beach's South Beach houses the club run by Williams's Armand, whose partner Albert, its star act, poses as his wife to fool their son's future in-laws, a conservative senator's family.
Q 20Williams won his only Oscar for playing therapist Sean Maguire in which film?
Good Will Hunting
Good Will Hunting finally brought Williams an Oscar at his fourth nomination: he had lost three times as a leading man and won for a supporting role.
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's story follows Andrew, a household robot who begins to show feelings and creativity; the title comes from the two centuries he lives while trying to become human.
Q 24In Insomnia (2002), Williams's murderer is pursued through Alaska by a sleep-deprived detective played by whom?
Al Pacino
Al Pacino played detective Will Dormer, sleepless under Alaska's endless daylight and wracked by guilt after shooting his own partner in the fog, a secret Williams's killer saw and uses.
Q 25In 1982 Robin Williams starred in which film of a John Irving novel?
The World According to Garp
The World According to Garp cast Williams as a novelist outshone by his own mother: her feminist book is an overnight sensation that makes her rich and famous, a success his fiction never matches.
Q 26In the Night at the Museum films, Williams plays a wax figure of which US president?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt has a real claim on the building: his father helped found the American Museum of Natural History, where the first film is set, and its entrance hall is a memorial to the president.
Q 27From 1986 Robin Williams hosted HBO's Comic Relief benefits for the homeless with Whoopi Goldberg and which other comedian?
Billy Crystal
Billy Crystal made up the trio that fronted every HBO telethon, though the charity itself, set up to help America's homeless, was the creation of comedy writer Bob Zmuda.
Q 28Robin Williams began touring with the USO in October 2002, flying out to entertain American troops in which country?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan it was: he joked with soldiers in a bombed-out hangar at Bagram air base, and reporters had to hold the story until he had left the country because his family feared for his safety.
Q 29Williams's daughter, born in 1989, was named after a princess in which video game series?
The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda's princess gave Zelda Williams her name, and in 2011 Nintendo put father and daughter together in a television commercial for a new edition of one of the games.
Q 30Which hobby did Robin Williams take up partly as a substitute for drugs?
Cycling
Cycling took over: he built up a large collection of bicycles, one valued enough that his heirs had to settle between them who would keep it after his death.