The sitcom star who became a big-name director

Penny Marshall was an unlikely Hollywood success story. She spoke in a nasal Bronx accent and as an aspiring actress played a “homely girl” opposite Farrah Fawcett in a TV shampoo ad. But after a 1975 Happy Days episode in which the Fonz finds two girls for a double date, Marshall was on the path to stardom. That episode marked the debut of her Laverne DeFazio and Cindy Williams’ Shirley Feeney, the title characters of spin-off sitcom Laverne & Shirley, which became America’s most-watched show during its 1976–83 run. Marshall then moved behind the camera, helming Big (1998) and A League of Their Own (1992) and becoming the first woman to direct movies that earned more than $100 million. Resolutely self-effacing, she claimed to be mystified by her cinematic achievements. “I’m not an articulate person,” Marshall said, “but I have a strange combination of insecurity and fearlessness.” Marshall was born in the Bronx in 1943 “to a showbiz family,” said the Associated Press. Her father was an industrial filmmaker, her mother taught tap dance, and her older brother, Garry, would create Happy Days and direct Pretty Woman. Marshall got her first real break in 1971 when her brother—then a producer at ABC—cast her as Jack Klugman’s gloomy secretary, Myrna Turner, on TV’s The

Odd Couple, said The New

York Times. “Viewers fell in love with her poker-faced humor and Bronx-accented whine,” assets she deployed again on Laverne & Shirley, about two Milwaukee brewery employees who share misadventures in dating and work. Marshall directed several episodes, and in 1986 took over the Whoopi Goldberg spy comedy Jumpin’ Jack Flash after the original director dropped out.

That film was only modestly successful, said The Washington Post, but it led to Big, “a comic fantasy starring Tom Hanks as a boy who magically transforms overnight into an adult.” She followed it with medical drama Awakenings (1990), and then directed Geena Davis and Hanks in A League of Their Own, about the women who played professional baseball during World War II. Reviewers found Marshall’s movies sentimental, but she saw nothing wrong with aiming for the heart. “I like corny,” she said. “I like what moves me.”