Cindy Williams’ family announced on Monday that she had passed away. She was best known for playing Shirley on the hit 1970s sitcom “Laverne & Shirley.”
Williams died in Los Angeles on January 25 after a short illness, according to a statement released by her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, through a family spokeswoman named Liza Cranis. She was 75 years old.
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 also in the movies “American Graffiti,” which George Lucas directed in 1973, and “The Conversation,” which Francis Ford Coppola directed in 1974. She was nominated for a BAFTA award in the Best Supporting Actress category for her work in the first film.
But “Laverne & Shirley,” the spinoff of “Happy Days” that ran on ABC from 1976 to 1983 and was one of the most popular shows on TV when it was at its best, was by far her most famous role. From 1976 to 1983, the show was on the air.
Golden Globe-nominated Williams played Shirley, who was more traditional than Marshall’s character, Laverne, who worked at a Milwaukee bottling factory in the 1950s and 1960s.
We sort of had telepathy.
In a 2013 interview for the TV Academy Foundation, Williams talked about the time he and Marshall worked together.
If we walk into a room together and if there’s something unique in the room, we’ll see it at the same time and have the same comment about it. We were always just like that.
Garry Marshall, who was Penny Marshall’s brother and died in 2016, saw a gap in the market that he wanted to fill.
There are no shows about blue-collar girls on the air.
He thought back to how he had sold the idea to Fred Silverman, who was in charge of ABC at the time.
He said, ‘It’s on! What’s its name?’
Marshall recalled.
I said, ‘Laverne & Shirley.’ ‘Good, I love it!’
Williams and Penny Marshall, who died in 2018 at the age of 75, were said to have cared a lot about the quality of the show and even rewrote some of it themselves.
We had a litmus test, which was if the script made Penny and me laugh out loud. That’s what we were going for … to make the studio audience laugh out loud, then we figured it would translate to the audience at home,
she said once in an interview.
So, if it made us laugh out loud at rehearsal, then we knew it was good to go. When it didn’t, we would re-write it, or try and put things in that made it funny. Once we got the show on its feet and started moving around, we would add things, add lines, and ad lib. The whole cast would.
Williams, who was born in California, also said that she was surprised by how funny the show was, even though the person in charge of censorship was a born-again Christian.
Great guy, but he just wouldn’t let us say things, so it made the show even better, because it made us have to invent words and phrases around those limitations,
We couldn’t just refer to certain words for our saucy humor. We had to resort to what I would call risqué church camp humor.
We would substitute the word [sex] for ‘vodeo doe,’” she added, referring to the show’s popular made-up phrase for carnal doings. “We always thought that our born-again Christian sensor made ‘Laverne & Shirley’ funnier, because it involved clean humor, which everybody really enjoys whether they know it or not.
Every episode of “Laverne & Shirley” started with a theme song that was almost as well-known as the show itself. The phrase “schlemiel, schlimazel” that Williams and Penny used to chant while they skipped became a cultural phenomenon and a piece of nostalgia that is often brought up.
Williams has been in a number of well-known TV shows and movies made for TV over the course of her career. Some of these are “Lois & Clark: The Adventures of Superman,” “Touched by an Angel,” “7th Heaven,” “CHiPs,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Police Story,” “Cannon,” “Love, American Style,” “Room 222,” and “Hawaii Five-0.”
She reportedly even tried out for the part of Princess Leia in George Lucas’s classic science fiction movie “Star Wars,” which came out in 1977, but Carrie Fisher ended up getting the part.
It can all be accomplished, but you have to always stay yourself. You have to keep your sense of humor,
she said of her career’s highs and lows in the TV Party interview.
If you get knocked down, you have to get right back up and just keep going.
Williams got pregnant during the last season of “Laverne & Shirley,” so she only appeared in a few episodes. According to a source, she sued Paramount in 1982, asking for $20 million in damages so that she could be paid for the whole season. She settled for an amount that won’t be made public, and Penny Marshall was left to be the only star of the show until the end.
Her official website says that she has also been on stage and toured shows like “Grease,” “Deathtrap” (with Elliot Gould), and “Steel Magnolias.” In 2007, she made her Broadway debut in “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a musical that went on to win five Tony Awards.
