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Diane Lane is looking back at her memories of Robin Williams.
Lane, 60, opened up to Entertainment Tonight in a video shared Oct. 20 and filmed at the 2025 Newport Beach Film Festival Honors, where Lane received the ICON Award. Lane was asked about her 1996 movie Jack, which turns 30 next year. In it, Williams, who died in 2014 at the age of 63, played a boy who ages four times faster than normal. Lane played his mother Karen.
“The man was a breath of, more than fresh air,” Lane said of her late coast. “He set the bar so high in terms of good energy.”
The Anniversary star remembered the ”lovely wrap gift” he gave her when filming ended: a book of all of Shakespeare’s writings that he’d signed.
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“It holds a very special place in my library,” she said, “Because he has that in him. He can do all of it.” She explained that Williams could do “the court jester” and “King Lear” and everything in between.
“He brought all of it with him,” she continued, “So in that way, I thought that the gift was very appropriate coming from him, because he could play all the parts in all the plays.”
Jack, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, also starred Jennifer Lopez, Brian Kerwin, Fran Drescher, Michael McKean and Bill Cosby. The movie received negative reviews upon release, with Roger Ebert writing, “Williams works hard at seeming to be a kid inside an adult body, and some of his inspirations work well. But he has been ill-served by a screenplay that isn’t curious about what his life would really be like.”
But the movie had its defenders. Director Luca Guadagnino told the British Film Institute in 2024 that he thinks Jack is one of Coppola’s masterpieces. “For me, a great director invisibly masters everything he does. In Jack, you feel the way in which he’s taking this kind of conventional story but bringing humanity, and the way in which the world is created. It’s so beautiful,” he explained.
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But the actress admitted there’s “plenty” of regret going around and that she and her friends laugh about some of the things that have happened in their careers. “You go with the flow and you roll with the punches and you say, ‘Well, next time I’ll know better,’ ” she said. “I don’t mind making mistakes as long as I don’t lose the lesson.”
“For actors, sometimes it’s on film forever and you’ve got to enjoy that too,” she said, adding, “It keeps you humble.”
