Actor, director, and producer Penny Marshall is dead at the age of 75. Perhaps best known for her role in the hit comedy Laverne & Shirley, Marshall succeeded in all areas of the film and television industry.

Born in the Bronx, Marshall moved to Los Angeles in 1967 to try a career in show business. Her brother Garry, nine years older, was already there. “I didn’t know my brother that well,” she once recalled, “so I went and said, ‘Let me go meet him.’ He was doing well. He was writing for Dick Van Dyke and Joey Bishop and every show, so why not meet him.”

Garry Marshall, a film and television legend in his own right, was perhaps best known for creating the TV series Happy Days and directing such successful movies as Pretty Woman. 

He died in 2016 at 81. 

Penny Marshall’s early career had an awkward start: Her first television role cast her as the “homely” girl in a shampoo commercial. Soon she landed the role on The Odd Couple as the secretary of Oscar Madison (played by actor Jack Klugman). It was on that show she met actor Rob Reiner, who she married in 1971 (the couple divorced a decade later).

The pair both auditioned for the iconic 70s comedy All in the Family, but only Reiner was cast, playing Meathead, Archie Bunker’s son-in-law. Reiner subsequently became a successful director of such movies as When Harry Met Sally…, The Princess Bride, and A Few Good Men.

For Marshall, success came after a cameo on Happy Days—another of her brother’s shows—that launched her career. 

The episode was called “A Date With Fonzie,” and it aired on Nov. 11, 1975. Marshall debuted her character Laverne DeFazio, who, along with Cindy Williams’ Shirley Feeney, worked at a local brewery. 

“My brother called,” Marshall told an interviewer. “And he said, ‘Well, there’s a part of these two girls who put out.’ Ask Cindy if she wants to do it and she could play opposite Ron [Howard] and you’ll play opposite Henry [Winkler]. If she doesn’t want to do it, you can play opposite either one of them.’” 

The two characters were such a hit that they got their own spinoff. Laverne & Shirley, an enormous hit for ABC, would run from 1976 to 1983. 

By the end of Laverne & Shirley, Marshall was sitting in the director’s chair. Finding few decent roles after the series was canceled, she began directing movies—first with Whoopi Goldberg’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash, which did modestly well. 

Marshall then delivered a series of commercial triumphs: Big, the first movie directed by a woman to gross over a million dollars; Awakenings, nominated for three Oscars, including best picture – only the second time for a female director; A League of Their Own, now included in the National Film Registry; and The Preacher’s Wife. 

This was an extraordinary achievement for anyone, but Marshall was working in boy’s club industry, known for its misogyny. 

Like her character Laverne, Marshall didn’t take any crap.

 “I like corny,” she once said in response to criticism. “I like what moves me.”

A League of Their Own ends with a reunion of the principal characters at the Baseball Hall of Fame forty years later. Because the real room honoring the All-American Girls Professional Baseball league was “insignificant,” Marshall took over another room and decorated it to “look more like a genuine shrine.” 

Marshall cast actual league veterans to be in the scene. Steven Spielberg was impressed by this. 

“They’re who I did the movie for,” Marshall told him. “They’re who I wanted to honor.” 

When Spielberg asked if Marshall minded if he ended Schindler’s List in a similar way, Marshall said he was welcome. 

“And the truth was,” she wrote in her memoir “My Mother Was Nuts,” it didn’t belong to me. In the same way that the end of Steven’s movie belonged to the survivors, mine belonged to all the women who played the game.”

When talking to The New Yorker in 2012 about the various loves of her life—in addition to her two marriages, she spent several years with Art Garfunkel—Marshall unwittingly wrote her own epitaph: “I had a good run, though, way more than my mother thought I would do,” she said. “I led an oddly charmed life for someone she thought was a not charming person.” 

If you would like to see Marshall in her iconic role as Laverne, you’re in luck. While “Laverne & Shirley” isn’t available for streaming, MeTv is screening 12 episodes, picked out by Marshall herself, on Sunday Dec. 23. “Big,” “Awakenings” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” are available on Amazon, iTunes and Youtube. For a full listing of all her TV appearances and films, go here.

•December 18, 2018