Writer-director Garry Marshall dies at 81
LOS ANGELES — Writer-director Garry Marshall, whose deft touch with comedy and romance led to a string of TV hits that included “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley” and the box-office successes “Pretty Woman” and “Runaway Bride,” has died at 81.
The director also had an on-screen presence, using his New York accent and gruff delivery in colorful supporting roles.
Henry Winkler, who starred as Fonzie on “Happy Days,” saluted Marshall as “larger than life, funnier than most, wise and the definition of friend.”
Richard Gere, who starred opposite Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” said “everyone loved Garry. He was a mentor and a cheerleader and one of the funniest men who ever lived. He had a heart of the purest gold and a soul full of mischief. He was Garry.”
Marshall, brother of actress-director Penny Marshall, earned a degree in journalism from Northwestern University and worked at the New York Daily News. But he found he was better at writing punchlines.
“In the neighborhood where we grew up in, the Bronx, you only had a few choices,” Marshall said in a 1980s interview. “You were either an athlete or a gangster, or you were funny.”
He began his entertainment career in the 1960s selling jokes to comedians, then moved to writing sketches for “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar. He caught the eye of comic Joey Bishop, who hired him to write for his show
Sitcoms quickly proved to be Marshall’s forte. He and then-writing partner Jerry Belson turned out scripts for the most popular comedies of the ’60s, including “The Lucy Show,” “The Danny Thomas Show” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
In 1970, they turned Neil Simon’s Broadway hit, “The Odd Couple,” into a sitcom starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall and produced by Marshall. In January 1979, Marshall had three of the top five comedies on the air with “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mork & Mindy.”
