Before he was a film star, Robin Williams was a sailor with a pipe, a squint and a can of spinach — and Popeye was the unlikely role that brought him to the big screen.
Released in 1980, Popeye, directed by Robert Altman, was Williams’s first starring film role. He plays the cartoon sailor as a flesh-and-blood outsider arriving in the seaside town of Sweethaven, searching for his father and falling for Olive Oyl, played by Shelley Duvall.
The film is strange, musical and deliberately old-fashioned, and Williams commits to it completely: the mumbled voice, the physical comedy and the tenderness underneath the bluster. He does not play Popeye as a joke, but as a lonely man trying to find a home.
It is a signature early role because it shows what Williams would do again and again: take a character who could have been a caricature and play him with heart, so that the audience roots for him long after the jokes have faded.