Actor Cindy Williams, the optimistic Shirley of TV classic ‘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, Feb. 1, 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 Globe-nominated actress appeared in George Cukor’s “Travels With My Aunt” and starred in George Lucas’ 1973 nostalgic coming-of-age comedy “American Graffiti” and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film “The Conversation.”