Laverne & Shirley and American Graffiti star Cindy Williams passed away this week at age 75. Williams played the title role of Shirley Feeney opposite Penny Marshall who played Laverne DeFazio on the hit show Laverne & Shirley, which was a spin-off of Happy Days. The two also appeared on Happy Days.
Williams passed away in Los Angeles on Wednesday after a brief illness, her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, said in a statement released Monday.
“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.”
Cynthia Jane Williams was born on August 22, 1947 in Van Nuys, California. Her family moved to Dallas, Texas when she was a year old but returned to Los Angeles when she was ten years old.
Williams attended Los Angeles City College where she majored in theater. After college, she began her professional acting career by landing national commercials, which included Foster Grant sunglasses and TWA.
To make ends meet between commercial jobs, Williams worked as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes and the famed Whisky a Go Go nightclub, where she served the likes of Jim Morrison, Duke Ellington and Joe Cocker.
Williams quickly made a name for herself in Hollywood by picking up up important film roles early in her career including George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt, as Laurie Henderson, Ron Howard’s character’s high school sweetheart in George Lucas’s American Graffiti for which she earned a BAFTA nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. She even auditioned for Lucas’s Star Wars for the role of Princess Leia, but Leia was ultimately played by Carrie Fisher.
Williams met Penny Marshall, first on a double date, and later at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope company. The two were both hired as comedy writers, because “they wanted two women”, on a prospective TV spoof for the Bicentennial. While the two were writing at Zoetrope, Penny Marshall’s brother, Garry Marshall, called to ask if they would like to make an appearance on one episode of Happy Days, the television series he produced.
In 1975, Williams was cast as a fun-loving brewery bottle capper, Shirley Feeney, in an episode of Happy Days with Penny, who played her best friend and roommate Laverne De Fazio. The girls were cast as “sure-thing” dates of Richie (Ron Howard) and Fonzie (Henry Winkler). Their appearance proved so popular that Garry Marshall commissioned a spin-off series for the characters of Shirley and Laverne. Williams continued her role on the very successful Laverne & Shirley series from 1976 until 1982. At one point during its run, the series was the number one rated show on television. Williams received praise for her portrayal of Shirley Feeney. She left the show after the second episode of the show’s eighth and what would become its final season, after she became pregnant with her first child.
At the end of the seventh season, Williams was married to actor-musician Bill Hudson and became pregnant with her first child, Emily. “I thought I was going to come back and they’d hide [her baby bump] behind benches, couches, pillows, and that wasn’t it,” she said in 2015 on the Today show.
“When it came time for me to sign my contract for that season, they had me working on my due date to have my baby. I said, ‘You know, I can’t sign this.’ And it went back and forth and back and forth, and it just never got worked out. Right after that, [TV shows] would build nurseries on sets.”
In 1982, she sued Paramount for $20 million, seeking to get paid for the episodes she would miss because she was pregnant. After a settlement, she was written out of the series, and Laverne continued alone, without her best friend, for the final 20 episodes.
Her marriage with singer Bill Hudson of musical group the Hudson Brothers lasted from 1982 until 2000 and he was father to her two children. He was previously married to Goldie Hawn and is also the father of actress Kate Hudson.
In the past thirty years, Williams made guest appearances on dozens of TV series including 7th Heaven, 8 Simple Rules and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. In 2013, she and Marshall appeared in a Laverne & Shirley tribute episode of the Nickelodeon series Sam and Cat.
In 2022, Williams appeared in a one-woman stage show full of stories from her career, Me, Myself and Shirley, at a theater in Palm Springs, California, near her home in Desert Hot Springs.
Williams is survived by her children, Emily and Zak Hudson.
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Henry Winkler, who met Williams while playing Fonzie on Happy Days, shared in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, “Cindy has been my friend and professional colleague since I met her on the set of Happy Days in 1975. Not once have I ever been in her presence when she wasn’t gracious, thoughtful and kind. Cindy’s talent was limitless. There was not a genre she could not conquer. I am so glad I knew her.”
As news of her passing spread, many took to social media to pay their respects:
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