Seven years ago, news that the beloved actor Robin Williams had taken his own life sent the whole world into mourning. While the renowned comedian might be gone, his legacy lives on through his children, Zachary Pym “Zak,” 37, Cody Alan, 29, and his only daughter Zelda Rae, 31.

Now all grown up, Zelda Rae Williams is following in her father’s footsteps and is a rising star in Hollywood, working as an actor, producer, director, and writer. We’re taking a look at her remarkable life, career, and creative projects.

The daughter of a comedic legend, Zelda Williams isn’t oblivious to the enormous shoes she had to fill when she first began working in Hollywood. That fact on its own had her realize early on that if she were going to make it, she would do it by forging her own path.

“I think everyone thinks that when kids want to become actors, they are trying to usurp their parents,” she told E! Online in 2017.

Sort of counterintuitively, she always knew that, unlike her father, she wasn’t interested in comedy. Robin Williams’ career took off with his role as Mork in the ’70s sitcom Mork & Mindy, before he went on to star in many comedic movies and was famed for his improvisational skills.

“If your dad was the first person on the moon, you don’t go, ‘I am going to be the first person on the moon a second time.’ What would be the point?” she told E! Online.

But while the 31-year-old wasn’t trying to do the same thing as her father, that doesn’t mean the pair didn’t end up working together. Zelda Williams made her debut on the big screen at just 15 years old, starring alongside her famous father in the 2004 comedic drama, House of D. Speaking of her experience working in Hollywood as a teenager, she said she struggled to fit in in the beginning, as told to E! Online.

“I was just a difficult kid,” she says. “It’s not even the sense that it was contingent on me being a woman, I just didn’t fit in. I guess even more than that, I didn’t inhabit what a lot of people expected of me as a woman—for example, I had a shaved head for a time.”

And as the kid of such a famous, established actor, she could feel the pressure to prove herself to be a worthy actress in her own name. “A lot of actor’s kids are really beautiful models and I wasn’t that. I was really awkward and short and had this low voice. I didn’t fit what they expected of me as a child of an actor,” Zelda Williams said.

Having dabbled in acting and working alongside her father, as she’s grown up Zelda Williams has opted to focus on another side of the industry and what she loves most—writing. The 31-year-old made her debut as a writer, director, and producer in 2018 with the short film Shrimp, which premiered that same year at the Tribeca Film Festival. She told E! Online that unsettling the audience with new ideas is what she loved the most, which led her into delving into the world of horror and psychological thrillers.

Shrimp revolves around a group of dominatrixes in Los Angeles, but rather than taking a salacious look at the topic, which is often how the world is portrayed in film and television, Williams looked at the rather mundane aspects of the job and the ordinary lives that they have outside of work. In an interview with Variety, she explained:

“When I embarked on creating ‘Shrimp’ a couple of years ago, I never could’ve imagined where this journey would take me, or the wonderful people I’d come to know along the way. I’m truly ecstatic to have the opportunity to shine a more positive, honest light on this community than has previously been afforded it by Hollywood, especially as their mastery of consent is something I think many people right now could learn from.”

The short film’s success has earned Williams a deal with the production company Gunpowder and Sky to develop her short into a 30-minute series. The CEO of the production company, Van Toffler, told Variety, as reported in the same article:

“We were really drawn to ‘Shrimp’ because Zelda was able to take a generally taboo topic, turn it on its head and tap into the day-to-day happenings of the dominatrix community and tell their story in an authentic way.”

Robin Williams (2006), (Photo by Peter Kramer/Getty Images)
She was also lucky to receive some of the best advice with regards to acting from her late dad, Robin Williams. In a 2018 interview with Entertainment Tonight, she spoke about the acting advice her father passed on to her: