Mrs Doubtfire child star recalls ‘amazing’ Robin Williams gesture after she was expelled from school

Lisa Jakub, one of the child stars of the 1993 family film Mrs Doubtfire, has recalled the “amazing” gesture from co-star Robin Williams after she was expelled from school.

Jakub, who was 15 when she acted in Mrs Doubtfire, was kicked out of her high school after accepting the role in the film.

In the film, Williams played a divorced father who invents a cross-dressing alter-ego in a bid to covertly spend more time with his children.

“I got thrown out of high school on Doubtfire,“ Jakub, now 45, told Brotherly Love podcast. “I’m Canadian. I was attending high school in Canada, then I left for four months to film the movie. We were going to set up this system, pre-internet, where I’d mail my school work back and forth to the school. We did that for a while.”

The actor went on to describe her busy schedule including tutoring, schoolwork and filming before she was told she was no longer welcome at the school.

“As Matt [Jakub’s co-star Matthew Lawrence] well remembers, we had tutoring, three hours of schoolwork on set every day. We were a couple of months into filming, and my school in Canada sent a note saying ‘this isn’t working for us anymore, don’t come back.’

“Yeah, ninth grade. I was devastated. It was just so heartbreaking, because I had this life that was very unusual, and that was the one normal thing.”

After Jakub was expelled from school, Williams, who died in 2014, wrote a letter to the headteacher in a bid to have the decision reversed.

“It was a really difficult thing,” Jakub explained. “The amazing thing was Robin saw that I was upset – he asked me what was going on. He wrote a letter to my principal saying that he wanted them to rethink this decision and that I was just trying to pursue my education and career at the same time, and could they please support me in this.

“The principal got the letter, framed the letter, put it up in the office, and didn’t ask me to come back. Amazing.”

In the letter, the full text of which can be read here, Williams argued that “a student of her calibre and talent should be encouraged to go out in the world and learn through her work”.

“She should also be encouraged to return to the classroom when she’s done to share those experiences and motivate her classmates to soar to their own higher achievements,” the Good Will Hunting actor wrote.

Williams died in 2014, with medical authorities later ajudging that he had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a progressive and degenerative disease of the brain, similar to Alzheimer’s.