Mrs. Doubtfire's Lisa Jakub Says Robin Williams Spoke to Her About Depression

Lisa Jakub is opening up about working with Robin Williams, and the nice things the late star did for her.

The 42-year-old writer and former actress, who starred in Mrs. Doubtfire as Lydia Hillard, spoke about her experience acting in the film in an interview with Yahoo.

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“I had been working with an on-set tutor and sending my work back to the high school, but that just wasn’t working for them anymore, so they just kinda broke up with me,” she said.

“And I was really upset about that, and Robin, just being perceptive and kindhearted, reached out and was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ I told him what happened, and he wrote a letter to my school asking them to please reconsider. Would they work with me in trying to balance my education and my career? And he didn’t think that that was fair,” he continued.

“What I love about that story and what I love about Robin, it’s just the fact that he would do that for someone, that he would go out of his way, that he would take the time to realize that this would be important. And even if it didn’t work, somebody needed to stand up, and he did that for me. I don’t know if he ever knew how massive that was and how much I felt like he was in my corner. And how much that really shifted things for me and made me think about, ‘What is the impact I wanna make in the world?’”

She also said that Robin spoke to her about addiction and mental health.

“Robin was everything that you would hope he would be, and he was very open and honest with me about his issues with anxiety and depression. I was able to share with him that anxiety was something that I struggled with, and he would talk to me about mental health issues in a way that 14-year-olds aren’t usually used to adults being really open about those sorts of personal experiences with them,” she revealed.

He also cautioned her about using substances, and “that was a route that he had gone down with addiction and that it just made everything worse. And I think, as a 14-year-old kid actor, it’s a really good story to get, a really message to hear, because that does tend to be a well-worn path for a lot of kid actors.”

The director recently spoke out about the alleged NC-17 version of the classic.