COVER STORY : The Insiders...

With their own brand-new Blue Wolf production company and a shot-out-of-the-gate first production in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Robin and Marsha Williams could be the Hollywood couple of the moment. But it’s unlikely that the other Robin (Leach) will be fawning over their lifestyle anytime soon. The Williamses’ is a life of kids, causes and work--usually in that order--that revolves, at the moment, around a sprawling rented house in the Pacific Heights neighborhood here. It is temporarily home to the family, which includes Zelda, 4; Cody, 2, and Zachary, 10, Williams’ son from his first marriage, while they wait for remodeling to be completed on a nearby house they hope to move into early next month.

Robin, 42, answers the doorbell. He is barefoot and, in jeans and T-shirt, looks slimmer than expected, buffed even, as if he’s been working out. While Cassie, the family’s white boxer, wiggles and snorts a greeting, Marsha, 36, efficiently directs everyone into the living room, where a toy racetrack is spread on the floor and boxes, packed for the move by Robin, are neatly stacked in the corners.

Interviewing Robin Williams can resemble an exorcism, with unexpected personas--including the well-modulated British nanny he plays in “Mrs. Doubtfire”--popping out everywhere. His verbal output was accurately described by Oliver Sacks, the neurologist role model for the character Williams played in “Awakenings” (1990), who called it “volcanic--the geology of the human psyche.”

But Williams is also much quieter and calmer than one might expect; it is clear in talking to him that his periodic character outbursts are simply a very creative means of keeping the conversation moving. Consumers of Williams’ output, from TV’s “Mork and Mindy” through “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Dead Poets Society,” “The Fisher King” and “Aladdin,” may feel they already know something about him.

But Marsha Garces Williams, his wife and co-producer, is more of a cipher. She has been controversial from the moment she wed Robin, who with his former wife had hired her to be nanny to Zachary in 1984. She then worked for him as a personal assistant after that marriage ended in 1986. Although they have long maintained that they were not romantically linked until well after Williams had been separated, whispers have continued to dog the couple.

Hollywood tongues started wagging again this fall after a rather gushing article appeared in the New Yorker that, among other things, ranked Marsha Williams as a film industry force alongside much more seasoned female executives such as Sherry Lansing and Dawn Steel.

Marsha Williams, simply dressed in black turtleneck and slacks, is relaxed and more than willing to give credit where credit is due, singing the praises of co-producer Mark Radcliff and of Chris Columbus, director of “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which opens Wednesday.

“Mrs. Doubtfire” is a funny, cleareyed look at the divorce of Daniel Hillard, an unemployed actor, played by Robin, and his wife, Miranda, an interior decorator, played by Sally Field. Distraught at a court order giving his wife custody of their three children, Daniel disguises himself as Mrs. Doubtfire, who is hired by the unwitting Miranda.

The Williamses are relaxed and mutually attentive, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing frequently as they settle into conversation about their collaboration, partners both in business and in life:

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W hy did you decide to start your own production company?

M.W.: We had been talking about it, but then I read “Alias Madame Doubtfire” (by Anne Fine) sometime in ’87 or ’88 and thought it would be great for Robin. Fox had no producer on it, so they offered it to me to produce, to develop, for Robin. So we said OK, and then we had to speed-dial into setting up the production company.

Since “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987) we’ve been working together. I was on the set all day, every day. I sat next to (director) Barry Levinson for every shot. We reworked areas together, Robin, Barry and I.

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Where did the name Blue Wolf come from?

M.W.: It’s him (Robin), because he’s the blue wolf.

R.W.: The blue-eyed wolf. Actually, it’s just ‘cause we love wolves. . . .

M.W.: . . . And they’re on our wedding rings. . . .

R.W.: . . . . And I’m hairy.

M.W.: Furry. (Laughs) When I finally read the script (for “Doubtfire”), I think Cody was only 3 months old, and I thought, oh, it will take me two or three or four years to get it where I want it and to get a studio’s green light. But within eight months I had a green light. So I was getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning, because Cody wasn’t sleeping well. But it’s hard to complain when you end up with a movie that you’re proud of. People should have such problems, I guess.

R.W.: You have a production company for two reasons: so you have control but also so that you can find material like “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

M.W.: One of Robin’s issues is that he can’t always do something when the part is offered. He can sometimes obsess over something he would have liked to have done but couldn’t because he had a conflict. This way, if we have control and I know a project was developed for Robin, I don’t have any secret agendas for him--and frankly, I’m probably the only person in his life who is just for him. It doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other things that can get in the way. I can say, “We’ll wait a year and a half.”

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How do you two work together in finding Robin’s material?

R.W.: Sometimes I have this kind of sentimental side that will go for--(in soppy voice) “Oh, it’s about a puppy” or (anguished) “Ahhh, the nice lady died, and the kids . . . “ and she’d look at it and go, “No, it doesn’t work.” That’s why I need her opinion.

M.W.: You don’t need to be a latter-day Christ figure.

R.W.: (Thick Yiddish accent) “He’s a gentile, why is he playing Jesus?”

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In “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Robin, you had to be both funny and pretty serious, especially when expressing the pain Daniel feels at being separated from his children.

R.W.: The divorce was the part that had to be worked on, through the script and everything else, to make it as real as possible, because nowadays there are lots of families like that. I mean, the nuclear family is nuclear fission.

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Robin, how did you become Mrs. Doubtfire?

R.W.: Our early makeup tests, the ones with a lot of liver spots--it was like (stricken voice), “What happened to her? Ohhh, she drank a lot!” Then finally they went to more of a glow, which is what a lot of these old Scottish women do have. (In the voice of Mrs. Doubtfire) “Thee dooo, thee have this feace that just shines,” and it isn’t because of the wind; you see them and they just glow. And then it started to click. And then the voice came together.

M.W.: The voice was there from the very first makeup tests. We have a video of it--it was as if he had been instilled with the spirit of this woman. From the moment he had that makeup and hair on, he was in character.

R.W.: The body suit too. I mean, when you’re wearing a suit like that . . .

M.W.: Das boobs.

R.W.: Those alone . . .

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Your bustline must have been 55 inches.

R.W.: (Laughing) Oh, that would be conservative. It was like that lady in the opera the other night--Madame Butterball. But the bodysuit really helps--it’s ventriloquism where you are the puppet.

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One of my favorite things in the movie was when Mrs. Doubtfire was cleaning the house, sweeping and dancing.

R.W.: It’s like Madonna at the age of 85! You want to say, “Get down , let the old lady be sexy !” We tried different songs too--Chris brought in those rap songs, and it was just fun to move to rap songs. It started with “Foxy Lady,” which worked great, you know, Jimi Hendrix going “yooooom,” playing with a broom. And then we did a vacuum cleaner.

M.W.: I think if you put him in makeup that’s black or Jewish, somehow he’s going to fall into it. There’s something in there that’s waiting for the face to go on.

R.W.: We tried different voices--one that was (in an over-the-top matron’s voice that sounds like John Cleese doing Julia Child) much more, overly ripe, just frightening ! The Dame Edna territory had already been staked out and Dustin (Hoffman) staked out the Southern accent, so you have to find something that’s different. And gentle, but with a certain sternness; that accent allows it. And the body movement. People would see me walking and it had a certain gravity about it.

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What happened in that scene where Harvey Fierstein, who plays Daniel’s brother, and his lover are trying out all those different looks on you--vamp, Barbra Streisand--before finally settling on the middle-aged lady who is Mrs. Doubtfire?

R.W.: Harvey is so amazing because he knows every B-movie ever made. He would say something, and I’d take off on that and we’d play back and forth. “I yam your seester,” “I habba no seester!”--from some movie of Lola Montez--and he’d go off on that. There’s a lot of stuff they cut because we just went off into this strange world.

M.W.: There would be times when he would actually be Mrs. D--that’s what we called her around the set--and we didn’t interact the same way.

R.W.: It was kind of hard on our love life. (He switches from sweet Mrs. Doubtfire to a libidinous male with a basso voice) “Hi, honey”--it was like a horror movie when you’d see this little old lady go, “Hey, nice ass . . . how the hell are ya? Ha, ha, let me give you a big squeeze!”

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What about now? Do you still find yourself doing Mrs. Doubtfire?

R.W.: (In her voice) “Oh, yes, it’s a greeet thing to doooo on the phone if you don’t want to talk to someone. Helllooooo . . . no, he’s not here right now, dear. I’m very sorry about that. . . . Ohhh, that nasty salesman, really? Well, I’m sure that would be lovely, but I think you’ll have to piss-off now, because we really don’t want that type of magazine here. Leather World? God Almightyyy, that’s lovely, dear, and I’m sure the Marquis de Suede does a fabulous line of clothing, but noooo, I don’t think so.”

M.W.: He does that with all kinds of voices.

R.W.: (Chinese voice) “Hellla? Helllaaa? We no home . . . no home!”

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Marsha, it must be exhausting living with him all the time. Is he always on?

M.W.: No, no, I mean, it’s exhausting living this kind of life. We do a lot of traveling. We try to be normal parents for our children, and you know, we don’t have a normal life. But actually there are times when he is home more than any other working father. If I’ve been working 20 hours a day, which has been my norm for the past year and a half, and he’s not working, then I’ll feel comfortable saying to him, “OK, you’ve got to get up with the kids this morning because I need to sleep until 7.”

R.W.: (Sleepy voice) “Daddy loves Care Bears too . . . zzzzz . . . Cody, slip another video in . . . zzzzz.”

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Marsha, people know about your background, and think of you as the nanny for Robin’s family before you began your relationship with him. Were you ever concerned about taking on this project because it focuses on a nanny and a marriage breaking up?

M.W.: You know what? I never thought about it. I can’t think about what kind of connections people are going to make. But there was a piece in a small movie magazine I saw recently, a coming attractions column--of course they spelled coming with two m’s so I was laughing that this was such a literate magazine. It talked about “Mrs. Doubtfire” and then said, “Are we the only movie magazine in America that noticed the parallel between Robin Williams’ role and Marsha Garces Williams’ role as nanny to the Robin Williams clan?” But (I was a nanny to Zachary) way before Robin and I were involved. What’s the parallel?

R.W.: We were never involved when she did that job. Which is why I hate People magazine (which ran a cover story implying that nanny Marsha broke up Robin’s marriage to Valerie Velardi) and always will. They wrote an article basically saying things that were untrue. The idea of home-wrecking is b.s.

M.W.: The thing for me that is sort of curious is that, had Robin picked me up in a bar, would that have made me a better choice? I’ve had 15 jobs in my life and being a nanny was one.

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What other projects do you have in the pipeline?

M.W.: The only thing I feel comfortable talking about is a piece we have in the works on John Callahan, the cartoonist in Oregon who’s (a quadriplegic and) a former alcoholic.

R.W.: He’s the one who did that book “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.” All these cowboys are in the desert and they’re looking around and there’s a wheelchair overturned . . .

M.W.: . . . A posse, and they say, “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot.” It’s very black humor.

R.W.: He’s really been through it, but he also has a great, totally uncompromising way of looking at his life. Here’s someone who is very unsentimental about everything he does. His cartoons are deadly. One shows two blind people, a blind guy and a blind woman sitting there in daylight, with the sun just streaming in and the blind man is courting her, saying, “The night is made for lovers.” He’s not afraid to talk about it. (TriStar is developing the film.)

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Robin, you often seem to play warmhearted characters, but have you ever wanted to play a really bad guy, like a Hannibal the Cannibal type?

R.W.: Oh, sure. Anthony Hopkins said there’s something very amazing when you play those characters. He said that even when he played Hitler that there was an unexpected side that he found that was very effeminate and looking for those things is very interesting. That could be good for me because, like you say, I’ve been playing all these very giving, warm characters. (Lapsing into Mrs. Doubtfire) “Time to play something else now, dear.” That’s why in “Dead Again,” it was nice to play this defrocked psychiatrist, who basically had his wires slightly crossed.

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What’s the difference between being an actor and a comedian?

M.W.: You’re more free as a comic, I think.

R.W.: There are no restraints. In some ways that can help you free up in terms of acting, in doing a character like Mrs. Doubtfire (in Doubtfire voice), “where she could be just this,” but then if you want to give her a slightly brittle edge by simply saying (again as Mrs. Doubtfire), “Oh, my poor Winston (the late Mr. Doubtfire), as I hold this cold meat it reminds me of him.”

The danger sometimes is--and she’ll bust me on it too--that sometimes you’ll want to use old lines, go for the laughter, rather than develop the character. The other tendency for me is to be too vulnerable--where the director has to say, “OK, that’s a little bit too much,” and find something that allows the audience to experience it but without gasping for air. It’s like an acting teacher said (in English thespian voice): “Dear boy, that was a lovely scene and your emotions--there was so much of them! But it’s a bit like urinating in brown corduroy pants. You feel wonderful but we see nothing.”

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Mrs. Doubtfire is probably the perfect parent figure. Robin, is that you?

R.W.: No, I have a lot I learn every day. I may get up in the morning with them, but I’m not good at night. (Laughs) They can be pounding me on the head and it’s zzzzz . . .

M.W.: But you’re a tremendously loving and thoughtful . . .

R.W.: . . . And playful!

M.W.: . . . Parent. So if the children get an hour with Daddy at night before bed and just play with him, what a great thing. It’s more than a lot of children get in a week.

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Marsha, a lot of people in Hollywood found Lillian Ross’ New Yorker piece about you to be overly flattering. What did you think of it?

M.W.: First of all, it was something I really didn’t solicit or want. I’m really pretty uncomfortable being interviewed and try to stay away from it. How do I feel about it? I feel that Lillian Ross only writes--I mean, this is the way she’s written for decades.

R.W.: Some of her pieces go for 10 years.

M.W.: Why it surprises people that she would write about us in a flattering way surprises me because Lillian only writes about people she likes.

R.W.: Did you ever read her pieces on Huston or Chaplin? She has a piece on Lorne Michaels she’s been writing for 15 years. She just hangs out with you. She’s a friend.

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The grumbling centered on how in the midst of your producing duties you were also this flawless mother--and I think that people just have a natural skepticism about things like that.

R.W.: (In skeptical voice) “Aww--she must get pissed off. She didn’t have her period.”

She must have some bad moments, you know?

M.W.: Personally, I was a bit offended for Lillian that one would reduce her writing to thinking that she would come out of retirement because her son (Eric, a production secretary on the film before it started filming) answered phones on the production for a couple of weeks and that she would write a flattering article as a result. I’m going to get a lot more trash, and frankly, I’m not thrilled about it. The first set of press that came out when Robin and I were together was horrible for my parents. It’s like a feeding frenzy; they’re looking for dirt.

R.W.: It’s beyond dirt. They’re looking for bone marrow.

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Robin, do you read articles about yourself?

R.W.: No. Many interviews are like autopsies on the living--what they’re looking for is some hidden, deep-rooted thing, because everything else has been picked apart and scraped and scanned. I don’t know how many times they’ve asked me about John Belushi, 12 years later. It’s just the same thing about setting it straight with Marsha. I thought at the time that if you don’t speak about it, it’ll go away. It doesn’t go away.

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Marsha, with so many things going on in your life, what do you hope to be doing five years from now?

R.W.: She’s not Stalin--there’s no five-year plan.

M.W.: I want to have the time to read five books a week again.

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What kinds of books do you both like to read?

M.W.: A lot of the cyber-punk science fiction we have in common. But he’s not as much a cover-to-cover reader. If I like a writer, I’ll find every single book by Jorge Luis Borges and read it, or whoever happens to be my writer of the moment.

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Tell me about the film you did with director Bill Forsyth, “Being Human” (to be released by Warner Bros. next year).

R.W.: It covers 6,000 years and five different characters, all named Hector--so it could be the Broadway show “Five Guys Named Hector.” And it starts in prehistory and goes all the way up to modern times. It’s not a high-concept movie: “Evolution, the Musical!”

M.W.: I see it as basically the realization that after 6,000 years, we all still have the same needs. How have we evolved? The reality is we’re still just human beings.

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Robin, this year you were No. 35 on Premiere’s list of the 100 most powerful people in Hollywood, ahead of people like Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford.

R.W.: Yeah, but in Entertainment Weekly, I’m 87. (Cartoon voice) “Wait--35 and then 87, I’m going down, my stock is going down! I should go public now, me and IBM!” I did “Toys” and my stock went down, but then “Aladdin” was huge. Besides, who wants power?

M.W.: Power, especially on Hollywood’s terms, is such an illusion because it comes and goes.

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Is that why you choose to live here in San Francisco?

R.W.: It’s so we’re not surrounded by work all the time. Up here, it’s a bit like being in Switzerland. Every once in a while you’ll get faxes and go, “Oh boy, I’m No. 35, I’m a power. “

But walking around the streets of San Francisco, I’m sure a guy won’t be going (in loudmouth wise-guy voice): “Hey, Robin, you’re numba 35. You’re numba 8 7 in Entertainment Weekly, sport. What happened?”