Actor Cindy Williams, the optimistic Shirley of ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ dies at 75
LOS ANGELES — Cindy Williams, who played sweet, wide-eyed Shirley Feeney on the “Happy Days” spinoff “Laverne & Shirley,” has died. She was 75.
Williams died in Los Angeles on Wednesday after a brief illness, her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, said in a statement released Monday to the Associated Press through a family spokeswoman.
“The passing of our kind, hilarious mother, Cindy Williams, has brought us insurmountable sadness that could never truly be expressed,” the statement said. “Knowing and loving her has been our joy and privilege. She was one of a kind, beautiful, generous and possessed a brilliant sense of humor and a glittering spirit that everyone loved.”
Williams was the optimistic foil to Penny Marshall’s wise-cracking Laverne DeFazio on the iconic sitcom, which starred two 1950s roommates working on the bottle-cap assembly line at Milwaukee’s Shotz Brewery.
“When you can find those characters with attitudes who are in sync, they are funny and charming to watch. You see aspects of yourself in the characters’ attitudes,” Williams told The Times in 1993. “Usually in sitcoms, the characters you play are close to you. They are beats within yourself that you really play well.”
Though she might have appeared an expert at pratfalls when the show debuted in 1976, she was a novice to the sitcom genre. Before that, she trained in theater in high school and at Los Angeles Community College, then honed her skills when she was accepted by the Actors Studio West alongside Sally Field and Robert De Niro.
The Golden Globenominated actress appeared in George Cukor’s “Travels With My Aunt” and starred in George Lucas’ 1973 nostalgic coming-ofage comedy “American Graffiti” and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film “The Conversation.” She also auditioned for Lucas’ “Star Wars” but lost the part of Princess Leia to Carrie Fisher.
It was a fateful meeting with producer Garry Marshall and Fred Roos that put her on the path to chanting “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated” while skipping in the “Laverne & Shirley’s” opening sequence.
Marshall, Williams recalled in her memoir, “Shirley, I Jest!” turned to Roos and said, “I like her. She’s like a pudgy Barbara Harris,” the Tony-winning Broadway comic. They brought her on to their newly formed company, Compass Management. then, on her first audition, she booked the part of student Rhoda Zagor on James L. Brooks’ popular high-school comedy “Room 222,” one of the first shows featuring black actors in lead roles.
She then became friends with Garry Marshall’s younger sister, Penny Marshall, whom she met through mutual friends. The two were out-of-work actresses when they were hired by Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope company to write a prospective TV spoof for the Bicentennial.
“They got a lot of comedy writers or people who wanted to be comedy writers,” Williams told The Times in 1995. “They wanted two women. We would be assigned a certain aspect of the history of America and write a spoof on that particular aspect of American history.”
They had been writing together for a few months when Garry Marshall called to ask if they would like to guest on his ABC series “Happy Days,” reuniting Williams with her “American Graffiti” costar Ron Howard.
“Penny said yes and I said yes and we went and did it. The rest is kind of history,” she told The Times.
The women became household names after 1975, when their characters — two girls from the other side of the tracks — appeared on Marshall’s sitcom for a double date with Richie (Howard) and Fonzie (Henry Winkler).