Creator of Happy Days, who also directed Pretty Woman

Garry Marshall 1934-2016

As the creator of two of the biggest TV comedies of the 1970s – Happy Days and Mork & Mindy – Garry Marshall made America laugh, perhaps more than anyone else, in a troubled decade, said The New York Times. Later, he became a film director, and specialised in warm-hearted movies aimed at the mainstream. His many hits included the tearjerker Beaches, and the mega-grossing romantic comedy Pretty Woman. “I like to do very romantic, sentimental work,” he said. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.”

Garry Marshall was born in the Bronx in 1934. His father – who was Italian but had changed the family name – made industrial films. “The Story of Zinc, Smelting in the Pittsburgh Mill – we watched them,” Marshall would recall. “Not one laugh.” His mother, who taught dance, was the family wit; she introduced him to self-deprecating humour, “which became one of the great tools of humour throughout my career”. They were a close family: years later, he would cast his sister, Penny, in two of his comedies. At university, he decided to become a writer, and began his career – after service in South Korea – in journalism; by the 1960s, however, he had moved to Los Angeles, met and married a nurse, Barbara, and begun writing material for TV shows. He then created his own. Happy Days started in 1974, but was set in Milwaukee in what was perceived as a more innocent time: the 1950s. Marshall would later say that it was an “Italian-american kid from the Bronx’s fantasy of middle-class life in the Midwest”. The show became one of the most successful ever: the Fonz’s leather jacket is now in the Smithsonian. It ran for ten years, generating several spin-offs, including the zany sitcom Mork & Mindy, which launched Robin Williams’s career. “Critics have knocked me for targeting society’s lowest common denominator,” he wrote in a memoir. “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?” Pretty Woman made Julia Roberts a star in 1990. The Flamingo Kid had done the same for Matt Dillon in 1984. Marshall’s other hits included Overboard (1987), Runaway Bride (1999) and the The Princess Diaries (2001). His final film, Mother’s Day, came out in April this year. The critics weren’t impressed, but it made money. As well as being one of Hollywood’s most successful figures, he was one of its most loved, for his ebullience, decency and down-to-earth charm. He supported many charities, and at the end of every film he would pose for individual photos with the entire crew, down to the lowliest runner. He is survived by Barbara and their three children.