Film legend was 1970s sitcom king
Famed director brought classics like Happy Days, Pretty Woman to screens during 40-year career
LOS ANGELES— Garry Marshall knew how to tug at moviegoers’ heartstrings, whether with unlikely love in Pretty Woman or sentimental loss in Beaches.
But it was goofy, crowd-pleasing comedy that endeared the writer and director to generations of TV viewers in hit sitcoms including Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Marshall, who died Tuesday at 81, said in a 1980s interview that humour was his necessary path in life.
“In the neighbourhood where we grew up in, the Bronx, you only had a few choices. You were either an athlete or a gangster, or you were funny,” the New York native said.
Marshall died at a hospital in Burbank, Calif., of complications from pneumonia following a stroke, his publicist said. An outpouring of respect and affection quickly followed.
Ron Howard, who starred as all-American teen Richie Cunningham on Happy Days before going on to become one of Hollywood’s top directors, wrote on Twitter that Marshall went by a simple mantra: “Life is more important than show business.”
Richard Gere, who starred opposite Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, said in a statement that “everyone loved Garry. He was a mentor and a cheerleader and one of the funniest men who ever lived. He had a heart of the purest gold and a soul full of mischief. He was Garry.”
Henry Winkler, who starred as Fonzie on Happy Days, saluted Marshall in a tweet as “larger than life, funnier than most, wise and the definition of friend.”
Marshall rejected retirement, serving as a consultant on CBS’s 2015 reboot of The Odd Couple, starring Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon, and appearing in an episode this year as Oscar’s father, Walter. Among his final credits was Mother’s Day, a film released last April starring Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson and Julia Roberts.
Marshall, the brother of actress-director Penny Marshall, earned a degree in journalism from Northwestern University and worked at the New York Daily News.
But he found he was better at writing punchlines.
He began his entertainment career in the1960s selling jokes to comedians, then moved to writing sketches for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar in New York. He caught the eye of comic Joey Bishop, who brought him to Los Angeles to write for The Joey Bishop Show.
Sitcoms quickly proved to be Marshall’s forte. He and then-writing partner Jerry Belson turned out scripts for the most popular comedies of the ’60s, including The Lucy Show, The Danny Thomas Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In1970, they turned Neil Simon’s Broadway hit, The Odd Couple, into a sitcom starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall and produced by Marshall.
It ran for five seasons and proved the beginning of a TV sitcom empire that lives on in unending 21st-century reruns.
In January 1979, Marshall had three of the top five comedies on the air with Happy Days, which ran from 1974-84; Laverne & Shirley (1976-83), which starred Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, and Mork & Mindy (1978-82) with newcomer Robin Williams.
After cranking out what Marshall once estimated to be 1,000 sitcom episodes, he switched his focus to the big screen with 1984’s The Flamingo Kid, a coming-of-age story starring Matt Dillon, which Marshall wrote and directed.
He concentrated on directing with his later films, including 1986’s Nothing in Common; Overboard (1987); Beaches (1988); Pretty Woman (1990) and Dear God ( 1996).