Have you heard of Robbie Williams? And did you know he’s raising Jewish children?
OK, let’s start with that first one. The British pop star was in the extremely popular boy band Take That (think the British Backstreet Boys) before launching an incredibly successful solo career in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Williams is the subject of a new biopic called “Better Man,” released on December 25, in which his character is played by a CGI monkey, a fact that should probably be able to sell the movie to any audience. And yet, the film has been making waves on social media for the serious PR push it’s been making here in America, where many people don’t know who in the world Robbie Williams is (no, it’s not a nickname for Robin Williams, may his memory be for a blessing).
“I’m Robbie Williams,” we hear him saying in the beginning of the trailer, which was featured before many movie screenings in the U.S. last month and this month. “I’m one of the biggest pop stars in the world,” he goes on, bewildering many Americans who just wanted to see a three-hour movie about a fictional Holocaust survivor (“The Brutalist”) or a musical about witches (“Wicked”) and who had no idea who this giant pop star monkey man is.
Yet that description is not Williams being self-aggrandizing. The 50-year-old singer is, indeed, one of the biggest pop stars of his time period — a history-making musician with a record number of #1 tunes in England, who has sold billions of albums worldwide. Growing up in Israel and Europe, I can personally attest that the music of Robbie Williams was a big deal. I fawned over him dancing in the rain singing about wanting you “back for good.” I cried to his heartbreaking mournful “Angels,” which came out a few months after the tragic death of Princess Diana. I danced in my room to the trippy video of his catchy “Rock DJ” playing on MTV, one that featured him stripping down to a bloody skeleton. His infectious “Millennium” is a song that defines for me the turning of the century just as much as Will Smith’s “Willennium,” (Does this help contextualize it for my American millennials?)
But Williams is also a character. He believes in aliens (it’s a very big deal to him!); he officiated a wedding at his New York “Better Man” Q&A while wearing a leopard print coat; he took shrooms at Bono’s house (we should all be so lucky). He’s also has a lot of demons, struggling with his early fame, and has dealt with addiction and mental health breakdowns, which this 2023 Netflix documentary delves into. And just like another haunted larger-than-life man, Robert Downey Jr., he credits one thing for his salvation: his Jewish wife. He is what I like to fondly call a “Jewish wife guy.”
You see, Williams has dated two Spice Girls (Sporty and Ginger, if you need specifics) and one member of the pop group All Saints, but when it came to settling down, he chose Ayda Field, an American “Days of Our Lives” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” actress who he met shooting a film on aliens. Field’s mother, film producer Gwen Field, is Jewish, and her late father, Haldun Evecan, was Turkish and Muslim. Her parents divorced when she was 3, and Field eventually took on her mother’s surname. Fun fact: She went to high school with Jewish actor Jake Gyllenhaal.
In a recent interview with Jonathan Ross, Williams recalls first seeing headlines about Ayda saving his life and scoffing, but now he agrees. “I look back at 15 years at being with my wife and she saved my life… she gave me a life, she absolutely did.”
The couple has been together for over two decades and they have four kids: two girls, Theodora (who goes by Teddy and was the only Jewish bridesmaid at Princess Eugenie’s wedding) and Collette (Coco), and two boys, Charlton (Charlie) and Beau.
“My wife is Ashkenazi, she’s a Cohen… and so by, in turn, our kids are Jewish too,” Williams said in a 2022 podcast with Andrew Gold (not that Andrew Gold). Ayda’s maternal grandmother, Maggie Cohen Field, was raised in Queens, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania who were in the schmatte business. Her parents traveled to Paris each year for their work, and Maggie passed on a love of French culture to her daughter and granddaughter.
“We do Hanukkah and Passover sometimes,” Williams shared with Walla in 2023. “The truth is that I asked to do Hanukkah this year, because the two of us left our faiths. I’m a Catholic who distanced himself from religion, she’s a Jew who has distanced herself from her faith — but it’s important for us to be a tribe. It’s important to have that sense of belonging.”
“You know I feel more Jewish than Catholic. I even looked up what it means to convert, but it takes too much time, so I just decided to identify as Jewish,” he joked (he also wasn’t super into the idea of circumcision).
Heartfelt words from @robbiewilliams to his Israeli audience at his concert in Tel Aviv. pic.twitter.com/0pi4gMSyM1
— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) June 1, 2023
Williams last performed in Israel in June of 2023, despite protests against his performance. Before he came to the country, he expressed his sincere admiration for Israeli singer Noga Erez’s song “Nails,” saying it was one of the best tunes he’d ever heard and that he wanted her to be the next big thing. Erez was brought on stage to sing the Kylie Minogue duet “Kids” with him, and in 2024, he released a duet with her in an album called “The Vandalist,” a song called “Danny” in which Williams voices her therapist. Originally, it was Erez’s partner, Ori Russo, who sang the role, but it felt weird for him to play his romantic partner’s (and soon to be the mother of his child) therapist, so the couple asked Williams, who agreed and even said he channeled his best Russo for the track.
“When I see her — I want to be like her, I want to create and perform like her. I have a big respect for her talent,” he said of Erez ahead of his performance in the country.
“I can’t believe that the person whose clips I used to watch as a kid on MTV was that same person,” Erez said about her collaboration with Williams, because she, too, knows he’s just a really big deal.
