PENNY MARSHALL

(15 October 1943 - 17 December 2018)

The American actress turned producer and director, Penny Marshall, who has died aged 76 from complications with diabetes, began her working life as a secretary and in appearances on TV commercials. Her brother, film director Garry Marshall, cast her in How Sweet It Is! in 1968, at a time when she was mainly working in TV (Barefoot in the Park, The Magical World of Disney, The Super, The Bob Newhart Show and The Odd Couple etc). She played Laverne in Happy Days, and also in the two spin-off series Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy plus other small parts in films including Movers and Shakers with Walter Matthau, The Hard Way with Michael J. Fox and Get Shorty with John Travolta, among others. She continued acting in films and on TV, with her final appearance being in The Odd Couple on TV in 2016. Marshall began directing in 1979 with the TV series Working Stiffs and went on to make feature films of  Jumpin’ Jack Flash with Whoopi Goldberg, Big with Tom Hanks (the first film by a woman director to take over $100 million at the box-office). She also directed Awakenings, with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, A League of Their Own, with Hanks again, and Madonna, Renaissance Man with Danny DeVito, The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston, and Riding in Cars With Boys with Drew Barrymore, plus some more television work. Rodman, her documentary about professional basketball player Dennis Rodman, is due for release in September of 2019. Her job as a producer included some of her own films plus Calendar Girl, Getting Away With Murder, With Friends Like These..., Risk, Cinderella Man and Bewitched. Penny Marshall was married twice, first to the director Rob Reiner and then to the football player Michael Henry, with whom she had a daughter, Tracy. Both marriages ended in divorce. Following a bout of lung cancer, she wrote a memoir called My Mother Was Nuts.

MICHAEL DARVELL