Penny Marshall, the beloved sitcom star who became an equally beloved director with Big, Awakenings and A League Of Their Own, has died. The cause of death was reported to be complications from diabetes. She was 75.
Marshall broke out as the loud-talking, slapstick-prone Laverne DiFazio on her brother Garry’s wildly popular nostalgia series Happy Days, alongside Cindy Williams as her best friend Shirley Feeney the characters were spun off into their own show, Laverne & Shirley, which ran for eight seasons on ABC. (Williams left the show early in the eighth season Marshall finished that final year on her own.)
And when she wasn’t falling over counters and yelling at Michael McKean and David L. Lander’s upstairs idiots Lenny and Squiggy – look, it was the 70s, people laughed at anything – Marshall was paying close attention to the way the show was made, eventually directing four episodes and laying the groundwork for the second act of her career.
Just as her brother Garry and her husband Rob Reiner had done, Marshall moved to directing feature films, starting with a smallish comedy (the Whoopi Goldberg spy venture Jumpin’ Jack Flash) and picking something slightly more complex for the follow-up. In her case, it was Big, one of several body-switching comedies released in the mid-80s – and easily the best, thanks to a sharp script by Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg, a leading-man turn from Tom Hanks that feels like lightning in a bottle, and Marshall’s impressive control over potentially broad or icky material. (Hanks’s co-star Elizabeth Perkins deserves a lot of credit for that as well, but imagine a male director in the editing room with their love scene.)
Released in the summer of 1988, Big became a blockbuster – making Marshall the first woman to direct a movie to break $100 million at the U.S. box-office. The movie received Oscar nominations for best actor and best original screenplay, losing to Rain Man in both cases. (Hanks did win a Golden Globe, though.)
Marshall followed Big with an adaptation of Oliver Sacks’s medical memoir Awakenings starring Robin Williams as a fictionalized version of the neurologist and Robert De Niro as one of the patients he pulled out of prolonged catatonia with an experimental drug trial. The film snagged Oscar nominations for De Niro, for Steven Zaillian’s adapted screenplay and for best picture, but Marshall’s accomplishments were once again overlooked the Academy’s long-standing bias against comedies apparently extended to comic actors who made dramas, as well.
And if you think that’s just a theory, consider the way the Academy treated Marshall’s next picture, A League Of Their Own: snubbing it completely. What now looks like Marshall’s masterpiece, a dramedy about the all-female baseball league that sprung up during the Second World War featuring a complex script and terrific performances by Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna, among others, landed no nominations whatsoever.
After that, Marshall stopped making projects of substance – or maybe people stopped bringing them to her. Her directorial career shifted to more innocuous entertainments like the Danny DeVito service comedy Renaissance Man (which gave the young Mark Wahlberg his first screen role) in 1994, a remake of The Bishop’s Wife with Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington titled The Preacher’s Wife in 1996, and the Drew Barrymore coming-of-age melodrama Riding In Cars With Boys in 2001.
She turned up in smallish roles in movies and TV shows here and there, playing herself for industry in-jokes in Get Shorty and Entourage. She did a surprising amount of voice work, turning up in an early episode of The Simpsons and landing a regular gig on the 2013 animated series Murder Police. And she popped up alongside Williams, their Happy Days co-stars Ron Howard, Anson Williams, Donny Most and Marion Ross, and Mork And Mindy’s Pam Dawber for a very special episode of the recent Odd Couple reboot that paid tribute to Garry Marshall through his character, the father of Matthew Perry’s Oscar Madison.
It would be Marshall’s last screen role, but not her last project: one more picture, a documentary about basketball player turned political envoy Dennis Rodman, was in post-production, if the Internet Movie Database is to be believed.
Frankly, I hope it’s true. The idea that Marshall might have accompanied Rodman to Singapore earlier this summer for Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un makes me very happy. And Laverne would think it was a hoot, once you brought her up to speed on the whole North Korea thing.
@normwilner
