Garry Marshall, sitcom king: from Happy Days to Pretty Woman

Growing up in a less than salubrious quarter of the Bronx, Garry Marshall acknowledged his life chances were limited.

Happy Days: Mork from Ork (Robin Williams), left, and Richie Cunnigham (Ron Howard).

Growing up in a less than salubrious quarter of the Bronx in New York, Garry Marshall acknowledged his life chances were limited. “You had to be good at one of three things: stealing, dressing or making people laugh,” he said.

Marshall opted for the latter and, after cutting his comic teeth in the 1960s as a scriptwriter for the likes of Lucille Ball and Dick Van Dyke, he went on to create a raft of era-defining television sitcoms in the 70s, including Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Odd Couple and Mork and Mindy.

During the following decades he graduated to the big screen to direct hit movies including The Flamingo Kid (1984), Pretty Woman (1990) and The Princess Diaries (2001).

He was a keen spotter of acting talent. Among those whose careers he helped to launch were Robin Williams, who was catapulted to fame by his goofy role in Mork and Mindy; Matt Dillon, whom he cast when Dillon was still a teenager in The Flamingo Kid; Tom Hanks, who credited Marshall with “changing my desires about working in movies” after appearing in Nothing in Common; Julia Roberts, who was just 20 when she played opposite Richard Gere in Pretty Woman; and Anne Hathaway, who became a teen favourite after appearing in The Princess Diaries.

He once joked that the secret of working with movie stars was that “you’ve got to get them on the way up and before they go to rehab”.

Warm and expansive, with a rich Bronx growl and a strongly egalitarian impulse, Marshall was an unusual powerbroker in Hollywood in that he appeared to have no enemies. Those he worked with were made to feel they were part of his family — Gere spoke for many in describing him as “a mentor and a cheerleader” with “a heart of the purest gold”.

While making each of his movies, Marshall created a photo album that involved taking pictures of himself with every member not only of the cast but the crew too, down to the lowliest production runner.

He placed great store on loyalty — actor Hector Elizondo appeared in almost every film he made, often in cameo roles — and he was happiest in the bosom of his actual family, as opposed to his “film family”, members of whom he also cast in his pictures.

His films made him affluent but, although he enjoyed the material benefits of his success and had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he had little interest in being a celebrity. One of his favourite sayings was “there’s more to life than show business”.

His wife, Barbara, a former nurse whom he married in 1963, was similarly unimpressed by Hollywood glitz and made him keep the memorabilia of his 50-year career in TV and film at his office. On several occasions when work prevented him getting home for dinner, she showed up at the studio with their three children and told him “they want to eat with their father”. For keeping his feet on the ground, she got a “thank you” line in the credit of all of his movies.

His TV sitcoms were sometimes belittled for being unchallenging, lightweight fare, a criticism he was happy to accept. “In the education of the American people, I am recess,” he noted with typically sly self-deprecation. As a movie director he favoured warm-hearted family, coming-of-age and buddy comedies with a tinge of gentle pathos that might not have been groundbreaking but came to define a significant strand of mainstream modern cinema. “I like to do very romantic, sentimental type of work,” he said. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.”

He was born Garry Kent Marshall in 1934; his father, Anthony, who was of Italian descent, anglicised the family name from Masciarelli and worked in advertising. His mother, Marjorie Ward, was a dancer who ran a tap dance school in the basement of the apartment block in which they lived.

The family was “not rich but we never missed a meal”, he said. An asthmatic boy with numerous allergies, he spent sizeable chunks of his childhood in bed, but he recalled cracking his first serious joke at a family dinner when his father gave him a reproachful look after he had belched. “What’d you expect, chimes?” he demanded.

Despite his claim that the career options of a Bronx boy were limited to crime, couture or comedy, he enrolled on a journalism course at Northwestern University in Chicago. While there he wrote a sports column for a local newspaper and tried his hand at amateur dramatics, appearing in a college variety show with the young Warren Beatty.

After graduating he spent two years in the army in Korea before returning to New York, where he worked as a copy boy and a junior reporter on the Daily News. A keen drummer, he ran his own jazz band — and would later appear as a drummer in two episodes of Happy Days — and also played in the band backing comedian Lenny Bruce, from whom he said he learned to “take all the pain in your life, give it a little time and it’ll turn into humour”.

By 1959 he had made his breakthrough into TV as a writer for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar. Two years later he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked prolifically as a scriptwriter. His adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple as a sitcom launched a run of successes that saw him dominate 70s American TV situation comedy.

Biggest of all was Happy Days, which ran from 1974 to 1984 and starred Henry Winkler as the leather-jacketed, quiff-sporting mechanic “the Fonz”. Asked to make a show about flappers set in the 1920s, Marshall replied that he knew nothing about the era and suggested setting it in the 50s instead. He proposed calling the show Cool, but when test audi­ences thought it was a brand of cigarette, it became Happy Days.

The fondly nostalgic series, which ran for 11 seasons and 255 episodes, launched a retro craze and became such a cultural touchstone that the biker jacket worn by Winkler in the show was acquired by the Smithsonian and put on display as part of the permanent collection at the National Museum of American History.

Almost as memorable was Mork and Mindy, based on an idea by Marshall’s seven-year-old son Scott, in which Mork, an extraterrestrial who comes to Earth from the planet Ork, was played by the unknown Williams.

When Wil­liams attended the auditions, Marshall asked him to take a seat while he waited his turn. When Williams sat on his head, waving his legs in the air, Marshall cast him on the spot. He later commented that Williams was perfect for the role because he was the only genuine alien they had auditioned.

Asked once with whom he had most enjoyed working, Marshall gave an answer that reflected not only his generous personality but also his sense of humour. He cited Julie Andrews, whom he cast in The Princess Diaries. She was, he noted admiringly, “a lady who can curse with perfect diction”.

Garry Marshall. Screenwriter and director. Born New York, November 13, 1934.
Died California, July 19, aged 81.

The Times