Garry Marshall
Comedy writer and creator of Happy Days Born: November 13, 1934; Died: July 19, 2016.
GARRY Marshall, who has died aged 81 after a stroke, was a prolific director, producer and writer who created and wrote some of the biggest sitcoms and comedy films of the 20th century.
He had a hand in Mork and Mindy, which made Robin Williams a star, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Lucy Show with Lucille Ball; and, most famously, there was Happy Days, the hugely popular nostalgic sitcom set in the 1950s. He also directed several major films, including Pretty Woman.
At one point in the late 1970s, Marshall, who was a former journalist, was responsible for three of the top five comedies on the air: Happy Days, Mork and Mindy, and Laverne and Shirley, a sitcom about two blue-collar factory workers that starred his sister, Penny Marshall.
His first big success had been in 1970, when he and his then writing partner Jerry Belson turned Neil Simon’s Broadway hit, The Odd Couple, into a sitcom starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. It ran for five seasons and proved the beginning of a TV sitcom empire.
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, with Tom Hanks, Overboard (1987), starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and Beaches (1988), with Bette Midler. In 1990, Pretty Woman, with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, was a smash hit, and the pair were reunited for Runaway Bride in 1999, which was also a big success.
The Princess Diaries in 2001 was another winner, although Marshall suffered a flop with Georgia Rule (2007), starring Jane Fonda and Lindsay Lohan.
The director also had his own on-screen presence, using his New York accent and gruff delivery in colourful supporting roles that included a casino boss in Lost In America, as well as a crass network executive in Soapdish.
“In the neighbourhood where we grew up in, the Bronx, you only had a few choices,” Marshall once said. “You were either an athlete or a gangster, or you were funny.”
Marshall had earned a degree in journalism and worked at the New York Daily News. But he found he was better at writing punchlines and began his entertainment career in the 1960s selling jokes to comedians, before moving to writing sketches for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar in New York.
He and Jerry Belson also 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.
Marshall and Belson then detoured into screenwriting in 1967 with How Sweet It Is, starring Debbie Reynolds, and followed it up with The Grasshopper (1970), with Jacqueline Bisset. But the two men kept their hand in TV.
Marshall defended his body of TV work, which won more viewers than honours, in his 1995 autobiography, Wake Me When It’s Funny, written with his daughter, Lori Marshall.
“Critics have knocked me for targeting society’s lowest common denominator,” he wrote. “I believe that television was, and still is, the only medium that can truly reach society’s lowest common denominator and entertain those people who maybe can’t afford a movie or a play. So why not reach them and do it well?”
He 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 Roberts.
Marshall is survived by his wife, Barbara, and by his three children, Lori, Kathleen and Scott.