A Peter Pan for Yuppies: ROBIN WILLIAMS

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And now Hook, a very high-stakes, special-effects-laden megapicture. For Williams, who is in nearly every scene, making the movie was a grueling six months on the set. He was obliged to shave his arms and upper body every other day. And the acting wasn't easy, either: in a 40-year-old man, Mary Martin feyness -- "Come on, Lost Boys!" -- could be awful. Williams says Bob Hoskins, who plays Hook's first mate, Smee, gave him a key piece of advice: make Pan ever so slightly insane.

At the end of Hook, the Williams character, swearing off both youthful recklessness and play-it-safe overmaturity, declares himself ready for adult adventures. And so does the actor seem to be plunging headlong toward intriguing, invigorating professional risk. Williams reads several scripts a week, and of the half a dozen he is considering, only one, Mazursky's proposed sequel to Moscow on the Hudson, seems surefire commercially. Williams' next movie, Toys, a surreal comedy about a general who takes over a toy company, is to be directed by Barry Levinson, who directed Good Morning, Vietnam. Williams is also talking with director Bill Forsyth about starring in Becoming Human, a series of sketches about evolution; and with Oliver Stone about playing assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk in Mayor of Castro Street. Some comedies, some full-bore dramas, some possible box-office hits, some certainly not. But Williams doesn't think of himself as a latter-day Woody Allen. He has no auteurist ambitions. "It takes a lot of discipline and vision, and I am too lazy for that. I have never been able to really write." The only thing of which he's professionally certain is his feeling about network TV: never again. "This one ((ABC executive)) came up one day and said, 'I used to think Jack Carter was funny. Now it's you.' "

So he doesn't obsess about bigger paychecks. He feels he has enough power to get the movie roles he wants. He's no ascetic (there's a 500-acre ranch in Napa and a glorious new house overlooking San Francisco Bay), but the movie- star pampering is minimal: he drives himself everywhere and schlepps his own wardrobe -- actually, a bunch of old shirts -- to a photo session. He's happy with the way things have worked out but not, he wants you to know, complacent.

"It isn't a question of doing more work," he says of his goals. "It's more of your own internal critic that goes, 'You could do better than that. Take the higher road, and not the easy route.' " Having thrown off his desperate need to be wonderful, Robin Williams can now start being wonderful.