Actress broke new ground as director of high-grossing, crowd-pleasing movies
Life Story
Penny Marshall, who has died aged 75, starred in the sitcom Laverne & Shirley and parlayed her fame into a career directing crowd-pleasing movies such as Big and A League of Their Own, making her the first woman to helm movies that earned more than US$100 million.
During a career spanning four decades, Marshall rose up the ranks with help from her older brother, Garry, an established TV and film writer, producer and director. He worked her into featured parts in his sitcoms, including Happy Days, in which Marshall’s deadpan comic style and nasally Bronx accent made her instantly recognisable. Her recurring role on Happy Days as Laverne Defazio led to the Garry Marshall-produced spinoff Laverne & Shirley, which aired on ABC from 1976 to 1983 and was one of the most popular shows of the era. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams co-starred as employees in a Milwaukee beer-bottling plant who roomed together and shared work and dating misadventures.
Along with other former sitcom actors Ron Howard and Rob Reiner – the second of whom was her husband in the 1970s – Marshall used her television connections to forge a career as a Hollywood director. Her first film was the modestly successful comic spy romp Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), starring Whoopi Goldberg.
With Big (1988), a comic fantasy starring Tom Hanks as a boy who magically transforms overnight into an adult, Marshall became the first woman to direct a movie grossing more than $100m.
Its profitability brought her credibility in an industry that was historically wary of allowing women to direct big-budget productions. She followed up with Awakenings
(1990), starring Robin Williams as a shy doctor and Robert De Niro as his patient who wakes up from a 30-year coma.
In 1992, she directed Madonna, Geena Davis and Hanks in A League of Their Own,
about women who played professional baseball during World War II. The film earned nearly $108m.
Marshall’s other directing credits included
Renaissance Man (1994), with Danny Devito as a teacher who tries to inspire army recruits; The Preacher’s Wife (1996), starring Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston; and Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), starring Drew Barrymore in a drama about a teenager and the pregnancy that shapes her life.
Reviewers found Marshall’s movies sentimental and technically undistinguished, but noted her ability to wring disarming performances from her actors.
‘‘What she had was an instinct for knowing what would please moviegoers, large crowds of people,’’ film historian Jeanine Basinger said. ‘‘She had learned on TV what people enjoyed, what kind of characters, what kind of performances, and what kind of comedic material. She had an instinct for that, and that’s what her films represented.’’
Marshall often shrugged off similar criticism, telling the New York Times: ‘‘But I like corny. I like what moves me. I go see movies and I think . . . ‘I don’t get it.’ I get intimidated by what they’re saying, and there’s all these artsy parts that go right past me.’’
Carole Penny Marscharelli was born in the Bronx, New York. She got her first taste of show business at 14 as a member of her mother’s tap-dancing troupe, the Marshalettes. She attended the University of New Mexico in the early 1960s, later saying of her Bronx-centric upbringing that ‘‘my mother thought New Mexico was near New Jersey, New York and New Hampshire – don’t ask.’’
She was not an academic standout, and left university when she married Michael Henry, a player on the football team. ‘‘I must say what I remember most was getting married after a Brigham Young football game, and all that was on television the whole weekend was John Kennedy’s funeral. That was sort of an omen for the whole marriage.’’
She had a daughter with Henry before they divorced in 1967. Besides their daughter, Tracy Reiner, survivors include a sister and three grandchildren. Her brother Garry died in 2016.
In recent years, Marshall produced such films as Cinderella Man (2005), starring Russell Crowe as a boxer, and Bewitched (2005), starring Nicole Kidman in an adaptation of the 1960s sitcom about a suburban witch.
Marshall said she was not especially proud of the films she directed after A League of Their Own because more demands were put on her in making and marketing the productions. She spoke of having lost control of the films, and said she had been much happier as a television actress, telling one interviewer, ‘‘No matter how many movies I direct, I’ll always be Laverne.’’ – Washington Post