Known for role as ‘Laverne,’ TV star become famous director

Penny Marshall, NEW YORK — who starred in the long-running 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 $100 million, died Dec. 17 at her home in Hollywood Hills. She was 75.

Michelle Bega, a spokeswoman for Marshall’s family, said the cause was complications from diabetes.

During a career spanning four decades, Marshall rose up the ranks with help from her older brother, Garry Marshall, 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 an instantly recognizable television performer.

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. Marshall and Cindy Williams co-starred as employees in a Milwaukee beer-bottling plant who roomed together and shared misadventures in dating and on the job.

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 $100 million (it reportedly made $115 million domestically).

The movie’s profitability brought her credibility in an industry that was historically wary of allowing women to direct big-budget productions. She followed up with the medical drama “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, Marshall 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 $108 million and became one of the highest-grossing baseball movies of all time, surpassing “The Natural” (1984) and “Bull Durham” (1988).

Marshall said her reputation as a moneymaker helped bring more film-directing jobs to women, and she made her best-known films when other women such as Amy Heckerling and Nora Ephron were starting to make inroads as directors. But film historian Jeanine Basinger, who specializes in the study of women in cinema, was skeptical of Marshall’s assertion that she opened opportunities for women. Basinger noted that the environment was and remains largely biased against female directors.

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 in a remake of the 1947 Cary Grant-Loretta Young-David Niven fantasy drama “The Bishop’s Wife”; and “Riding in Cars with Boys” (2001), starring Drew Barrymore in a drama about a teenager and the pregnancy that shapes the rest of 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,” 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.”