CINDY WILLIAMS
(22 August 1947 - 25 January 2023)
Anyone familiar with the US TV shows Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley or the films American Graffiti or The Conversation will remember the actress Cindy Williams, who has died aged 75. Cynthia Jane Williams was born in LA to the electronics technician Beachard Williams and his wife Francesca. As a child, Cindy acted in high school and studied theatre at Los Angeles City College. Her first work was in commercials but then she acted on television in episodes of Room 222 (1969), a school-based comedy-drama. Other TV series including Barefoot in the Park, from the Neil Simon play, Nanny and the Professor, Hawaii Five-O, Cannon and Police Story. Then along came the teen comedy Happy Days (1975) in which she played Shirley Feeney opposite Ron Howard and Henry Winkler, and with Penny Marshall as Laverne DeFazio. After that, Marshall and Williams were cast in the spin-off series of Laverne & Shirley from 1976 to 1982.
In features from 1970 she was in Gas-s-s-s, Roger Corman’s black comedy, then Jack Nicholson directed her in Drive, He Said, an X-rated basketball comedy, after which Larry Hagman put her in Beware! The Blob, a sequel to the 1958 original. Her films improved with Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind, George Cukor’s Travels With My Aunt and George Lucas’s and Francis Ford Coppola’s American Graffiti in which Williams played Laurie Henderson and was nominated for a Bafta. Coppola then directed her in The Conversation, with Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert. It gained three Academy Award nominations, won two Baftas, and the Grand Prix at Cannes. She was also in More American Graffiti (1979), the sequel to the 1973 original.
Cindy Williams made many more films but nothing matched up to her early promise. Her last film, in 2020, was Richard Rossi’s Canaan Land, a controversial story about faith healing. Still, TV kept her busy with the Hanna-Barbera animated series Laverne & Shirley in the Army, Normal Life, a sitcom based on the life of Frank Zappa, another sitcom Getting By, and other TV movies.
In 1982 Cindy Williams wed the musician Bill Hudson, who was previously married to Goldie Hawn (and is the father of the actress Kate Hudson). They have two children, Emily and William, but divorced in 2000.
MICHAEL DARVELL