Robin Williams will be honored by his friend Billy Crystal at next week’s Emmy Awards. Crystal will deliver a tribute to Williams during the show’s In Memoriam segment. The show’s producer has promised that Crystal’s tribute will be “the proper and meaningful remembrance Robin so well deserves.” Crystal and Williams were long-time pals, co-starring in Ivan Reitman’s Father’s Day as well as hosting several Comic Relief specials together. The music during the segment will be performed by Sara Bareilles, who recently dedicated her song “Hercules” to the late comic.
The In Memoriam segment is a standard of almost every awards show, but tributes to passing stars are always tricky: who do you include and who do you leave out? Deadline Hollywood is reporting that the Emmys producers are “treading carefully with this year’s tribute, given that Williams lost his life to suicide, and given the drubbing the academy took last year at the Emmys when it expanded the traditional In Memoriam to add separate tributes to five people, including Cory Montieth who some felt should not have been singled out while industry veterans such as Larry Hagman and Jack Klugman were not.”
