Marshall parlayed his small-screen success to feature films, directing “ Nothing in Common” (1986), with Jackie Gleason and Tom Hanks in an uneasy father-son relationship “ Beaches” (1988), with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey and “The Princess Diaries” (2001), which starred Julie Andrews and launched Anne Hathaway to stardom. Another of his creations, the short-lived “Angie,” about a coffee-shop waitress, was also in the top five.ĭespite several failures - who remembers “Blansky’s Beauties” or “Me and the Chimp”? - Mr. Another sequel, “Mork & Mindy,” premiered in 1978 and made a star of Williams, the antic comedian who played an alien from a distant planet whose spacecraft landed in Colorado.Īt one point in 1979, those three sitcoms were the three top-rated shows on American television. Marshall and other partners launched the first of two popular “Happy Days” spinoffs with “Laverne & Shirley,” about the comic calamities two young blue-collar women in Milwaukee, played by his sister Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams. Played by Henry Winkler, the leather-jacketed Fonzie had a tough-guy bravado and an underlying humanity that saved “Happy Days” from being a saccharine saga of the ideal family. A secondary character named Arthur Fonzarelli soon took over the show. “Happy Days,” which starred onetime child star Ron Howard as Richie Cunningham, ran for 11 seasons. Marshall turned back the clock to the 1950s with the all-American Cunningham family, whose most trying dramas seemed to take place at the dinner table or the drive-in. With the Watergate scandal unfolding and the Vietnam War coming to an inglorious end, Mr.
Marshall launched “Happy Days,” which proved to be his most successful TV creation. “The Odd Couple” was not a ratings success, but it ran for five years and was later praised by New York Daily News critic Kay Gardella as “one of the best written, acted, and produced” comedies on television.
Marshall had his first major success in the early 1970s by adapting Neil Simon’s play “The Odd Couple” as a comedy series starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as mismatched roommates thrown together by divorce. Garry Marshall with actress Julia Roberts, whom he directed in “Pretty Woman” and other films, in 1999. “He provided a kind of escapist sorbet that cleared the palate of all the socially conscious TV shows.”
“He often said that if everything else on TV was school, he was recess,” Robert Thompson, a television historian and Syracuse University professor, said Wednesday in an interview. Marshall deliberately offered light, often nostalgic family entertainment. In the 1970s, when Norman Lear was revolutionizing prime time with such politically charged sitcoms such as “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons,” Mr.
Marshall also directed 18 feature films and helped make stars of Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway and Robin Williams. Besides creating top-rated TV shows (and a few flops) Mr. Marshall was an unabashed throwback to the family-oriented comedies of television’s first generation of the 1950s and ’60s, when laughs were paramount and social consciousness was absent. He had complications from pneumonia following a stroke, his publicist Michelle Bega said in a statement. Garry Marshall, who created inescapable escapist television comedies in the 1970s and 1980s, as the guiding force behind “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mork & Mindy,” and later turned to film, directing such box-office smashes as “Beaches,” “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries,” died July 19 at a hospital in Burbank, Calif.