Williams died in L.A. on Wednesday, Jan 25, after brief illness, her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, said in a statement.
“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.”
After playing a pot-smoking hippie in the Maggie Smith-starring Travels With My Aunt (1972), directed by George Cukor, Williams portrayed Laurie, Ron Howard’s girlfriend in American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas.
The box office smash was nominated for best picture, as was her next movie, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).
In 1975, Williams and Penny Marshall were writing partners working for $30 a week on bicentennial spoof for Coppola’s Zoetrope when Gary Marshall hired them for an episode of ABC’s Happy Days.
Portraying “fast girls” recruited by Fonzie (Henry Winkler) for double date with Richie Cunningham (Howard), the pair displayed onscreen chemistry.
“We sort of had telepathy,” Williams said in 2013 for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews. “If we walk into a room together and if there’s something unique in the room, we’ll see it at the same time and have the same comment about it. We were always just like that.”
Laverne & Shirley
Garry Marshall then pitched a comedy that starred the duo to ABC entertainment chief Silverman. “There are no shows about blue-collar girls” he recalled in 2000. “He said, ‘It’s on! What’s its name?’ ‘I said, Laverne & Shirley.’ ‘Good, I love it!’”
Laverne & Shirley debuted No. 1 in the ratings on Jan. 26, 1976, and, in its post-Happy Days spot at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, became the highest-rated series for the 1977-78 and 1978-79 seasons.
The series lasted 8 seasons but wrapped in May 1983 without Williams.
At the end of season 7, Williams, married to actor-musician Bill Hudson, 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.
“When it came time 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, [shows] would build nurseries on sets.”
In 1982, she sued Paramount for $20 million, seeking to get paid for the episodes she would miss. After settlement, she was written out of the series, and Laverne went at it alone for the final 20 episodes.
She and family lived in the Dallas area for 9 years — she and mom had fled there because her dad was an alcoholic — before they returned to California and bought a house in the San Fernando Valley when Williams was 11.
Williams acted in plays at Birmingham High School and was voted “funniest female” before graduating in 1965. She then majored in theater at Los Angeles City College and was best friends with another actress, Lynne Marie Stewart (Bobbie in American Graffiti and Miss Yvonne on Pee-wee’s Playhouse).
Williams worked as waitress at the International House of Pancakes and the famed Whisky a Go Go nightclub, where she served drinks to Jim Morrison, Duke Ellington and Joe Cocker.
Garry Marshall and Fred Roos, who were launching a company, agreed to represent her, and she also signed with the Fred Kohner Agency, which got her a part on the ABC series Room 222 in 1969.
Williams did commercials, appeared on Barefoot in the Park, My World and Welcome to It and Nanny and the Professor. She was a regular on the Gene Kelly-hosted The Funny Side. She also appeared in films including Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said (1971) and Beware! The Blob (1972).
“I said, ‘This is not going to be fun, I’m going to cry during this whole 28-night shoot,’ and I did,” she said. “But after two weeks, Lucas took the whole cast into the editing bay, and he showed us 20-minute assemblage of the film with music. I remember Harrison Ford standing next to me and saying, ‘This is [bleeping] great.’”
Williams was nominated for a BAFTA award for best supporting actress for American Graffiti but lost out to Ingrid Bergman of Murder on the Orient Express.
On The Conversation, she was “surrounded by the best of the best,” she said. “Coppola loves actors. He would say to the cinematographer, you let your actors walk through the scene and you watch them and then you’ll know where to put the camera.”
She auditioned for Princess Leia on Star Wars (1977) but knew that Lucas wanted a younger actress, and Carrie Fisher was cast.
Williams first met the Bronx-born Penny Marshall on double date years earlier during a Liza Minnelli performance at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel. They went backstage and met Minnelli and the opening act, Little Richard, who said something good was going to happen to them.
The comedy, shot before an audience of 450 people on Stage 20 on the Paramount lot, was known for physical comedy not seen since I Love Lucy.
“Lucy was a physical comedienne, and she would be all over the stage, so Desi Arnaz, being the genius he was, put all of their cameras on these dollies,” Williams once said.
“On Laverne & Shirley there are 3 cameras, you’ve got the stage, as though you are watching a play, and you have the cameras moving with us on dollies. Usually, [sitcom] cameras are set in place and stagnant, but our cameras were like Lucille Ball’s cameras.”
She and Marshall never used stunt doubles. The Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures once named them honorary stuntmen and gave them buckles.
Williams explained Laverne & Shirley‘s appeal: “we made sure the joke was always on us, we never made fun of anyone else. We also wanted to keep the wolf nipping at our heels, like how are we going to pay the rent, how are we going to pay the electric bill. So we kept it grounded in that. We also made sure it was extremely funny to us.”
Despite its popularity, the sitcom never won an Emmy, receiving just one nomination, for costume design.
Williams said her favorite episodes were 1977’s “Guinea Pigs” and the 1980 two-parter “Murder on the Moose Jaw Express.”
She returned in 1979 for More American Graffiti, with Laurie and Steve now married.
Other film credits also included Roger Corman’s Gassss (1970), The Killing Kind (1973), Mr. Ricco (1975), The First Nudie Musical (1976), Big Man on Campus (1989), Bingo (1991) and Stealing Roses (2012).
A member of The Actors Studio West, Williams appeared on Broadway as Mrs. Tottendale in 2007 in The Drowsy Chaperone, starred in national tours of Grease (as Miss Lynch) and Deathtrap and had three-year stint in Menopause: The Musical in Las Vegas.
Her memoir, Shirley, I Jest!: A Storied Life, was published in 2015. Seven years later, she toured the country in one-woman show Me, Myself & Shirley, where she shared memories of her career.
