National Post (National Edition)
A TV star & director who was in a league of her own
REMEMBERED FOR LAVERNE & SHIRLEY AND MANY FILMS
Penny Marshall, the nasal-voiced co-star of the slapstick sitcom Laverne & Shirley and later the chronically selfdeprecating director of hit films such as Big and A League of Their Own, died Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 75.
Her publicist, Michelle Bega, said the cause was complications of diabetes. Marshall had in recent years been treated for lung cancer, discovered in 2009, and a brain tumour. She announced in 2013 that the cancer was in remission.
Marshall became the first woman to direct a feature film that grossed more than $100 million when she made Big in 1988. That movie, a comedy about a 12-year-old boy who magically turns into an adult (Tom Hanks) and then has to navigate the grown-up world, was as popular with critics as with audiences.
Four years later she repeated her box-office success with A League of Their Own, a sentimentally spunky comedy about a wartime women’s baseball league with an ensemble cast that included Madonna, Geena Davis, Rosie O’donnell and Hanks.
In between, she directed Awakenings (1990), a medical drama starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
A writer for Cosmopolitan magazine once commented that Marshall “got into directing the ‘easy’ way — by becoming a television superstar first.” That was a reference to her seven seasons (1976-83) as Laverne Defazio, the brasher of two young roommates, brewery assembly-line workers, on the hit ABC comedy series Laverne & Shirley, set in 1950s and ’60s Milwaukee.
In Hollywood, Marshall had a reputation for instinctive directing, which could mean endless retakes. But she was also known for treating filmmaking as a team effort.
“I have my own way of functioning,” she said in 1992. “My personality is, I whine. It’s how I feel inside. I guess it’s how I use being female, too. I touch a lot to get my way and say, ‘Pleeease, do it over here.’ So it can be an advantage — the anti-director.”
When Vanity Fair asked her to identify her greatest regret, she said, “That when I was a size 0, there was no size 0.”
Carole Penny Marshall was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in the Bronx. Her father, Anthony, was an industrial filmmaker, and her mother, Marjorie (Ward) Marshall, taught dance. The family name had been changed from Masciarelli.
Marshall attended the University of New Mexico. There she met and married Michael Henry, a college football player.
They had a daughter, but the marriage lasted only two years, and Marshall headed for California, where her older brother, Garry, had become a successful comedy writer.
She made her film debut in The Savage Seven, a 1968 biker-gang drama, and had a small part the same year in How Sweet It Is! — a romantic comedy starring Debbie Reynolds and James Garner.
Marshall played guest roles on television series until she got her big break in 1971, when she was cast in the recurring part of Jack Klugman’s gloomy secretary, Myrna Turner, on the ABC sitcom The Odd Couple. Her brother got her the job, but nepotism had nothing to do with it when viewers fell in love with her poker-faced humour and Bronx-accented whine.
That same year she married Rob Reiner, who was then a star of the hit series All in the Family. He adopted her daughter, but they divorced in 1979.
When Laverne & Shirley ended in 1983, after considerable on-set conflict between the co-stars, Marshall began making a handful of films and television appearances. Then Whoopi Goldberg, a friend, asked her to take over for a director she wasn’t getting along with on Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), a comic spy caper. The movie was far from an unqualified success, but it led to Big.
Marshall’s two films after A League of Their Own were not as well received. Renaissance Man (1994) was savaged by critics. The Preacher’s Wife (1996) brought in just under $50 million domestically.
Riding in Cars With Boys, a 2001 saga of teenage motherhood starring Drew Barrymore, was the last film she directed.
In 2012 she published a bestselling memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, which began in her characteristically self-effacing way:
“I’m not someone who’s had to deal with much personal drama outside of the usual: growing up with parents who hated each other, two marriages and divorces, the ups and downs of various relationships, raising a daughter and watching friends crack up and overdose. There was the cancer thing, too. As you can see, though, there’s nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that most people don’t go through, nothing that says, ‘Penny, you were lucky to get through that one.’ ”