Mrs. Doubtfire

November 24, 1993: Chris Columbus, director of Home Alone, adapted Anne Fine's 1987 novel "Madame Doubtfire" into a San Francisco comedy. Robin Williams played Daniel Hillard, a voice actor who disguises himself as an elderly Scottish nanny to spend time with his three children after divorce. Sally Field was his ex-wife Miranda; Pierce Brosnan played the rival Stu. The transformation into Mrs. Doubtfire took four hours in the makeup chair each day—a daily endurance test that earned Greg Cannom, Ve Neill, and Yolanda Toussieng the Academy Award for Best Makeup. Williams won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, and the film itself won Best Motion Picture in that category.

$441.3 million worldwide—the second-highest-grossing film of 1993, behind only Jurassic Park. The film's comedy moments became iconic: the run-by fruiting, the cake-frosting face, the quick-change artistry in a restaurant where Daniel darts between the dining room and the kitchen. Yet the film's strength was that it never let the comedy eclipse the emotional truth of a father fighting for access to his kids, of a marriage shattered, of love persisting after the ring comes off.

The house at 2640 Steiner Street in San Francisco, the Hillard family home in the film, became something neither Columbus nor Williams could have predicted. When Robin Williams died on August 11, 2014, fans left flowers and tributes on the steps—a makeshift memorial to a man who had made them laugh and cry. The film endured not as a period piece but as a comfort object, a divorce movie that was honest with kids about what they were feeling: that their parents' split wasn't their fault, and that love didn't require a happy ending.