worrying about whether my schtick is going to be funny or not," admits Crystal."For a comedian, the world is a rough, often unforgiving road. People want you to be funny every time out."

Crystal admits one of his biggest scares came two years ago when Kenneth Branagh asked him to play the gravedigger in the new screen version of Hamlet.

"The last time I'd had anything to do with Hamlet was as an English assignment in high school," he says.

"I tried every way to get out of it. I told Kenneth that my voice would sound too whiny for Shakespeare, but he insisted. Then I stayed awake for weeks trying to find ways to try and make the scene funny. I thought about not giving Kenneth the skull to see how he'd cope with that one. Comedians are always having to improvise on their feet. Serious actors think it's easy."

Crystal's butterflies had a bit of a rest while he worked on his new comedy Father's Day, which opens in local theatres on Friday.

He is cast opposite longtime friend and master of improv, Robin Williams.

They play strangers who discover, 16 years earlier, they had an affair with the same woman (Nastassia Kinski) and one of them may have fathered her runaway teenage son (Charlie Hofheimer).

Crystal first met Williams 20 years ago.

"I was doing (the TV series) Soap for ABC and Robin had just been signed to star in Mork and Mindy. We all heard about this wild man, so when I learned when he was doing an improv class I went to see what he was all about."

Crystal, 50, admits he is as obsessive about being the father of two daughters as he is about being funny.

"Basically I told my daughters (Jenny, 24, and Lindsay, 19) that their lives were their own except that they were not allowed to have sex until I was dead. Barring that, they were to act as though they were celibate."


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