Cindy Williams, actress who found fame in the hit sitcom Laverne & Shirley – obituary

Cindy Williams, who has died aged 75, was an actress and producer who made her name in the sitcom Happy Days before becoming half of the duo in the spin-off series Laverne & Shirley, which had a hugely successful seven-year run starting in 1976; in Britain it built a loyal following on daytime television, first on ITV and then the BBC.

The wisecracking pair were bottle-cappers in a Milwaukee brewery in the late 1950s and into the following decade; Cindy Williams played the straight-laced and naive Shirley Feeney, flatmate and best friend of Penny Marshall’s more worldly-wise and cynical Laverne DeFazio.

The show was such a success, Cindy Williams believed, “Because we played everyday people. Blue collar workers. We had things in common with everybody. We struggled to pay the rent, the electric bill, the gas bill. We always wanted to maintain the sense that the wolf was always nipping at our characters’ heels and we were just one half-step ahead.”

Cynthia Jane Williams was born into a religious family in Los Angeles on August 22 1947; her mother was a waitress, her father was an electronics technician. The family soon moved to Dallas, returning to LA when she was 10. She caught the acting bug early, as an escape from her family’s travails: “I was a kid with an alcoholic father whose parents would get in violent fights,” she recalled.

After leaving Birmingham High School she studied theatre at Los Angeles City College. She enrolled at the Actors Studio but was rarely there as she had begun to pick up work in TV commercials and in sitcoms.

In 1972 she landed a role as a hippie in George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt, loosely based on the Graham Greene novel, then earned a Bafta nomination playing the high-school sweetheart of Ron Howard’s character in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973).

The following year she was in Francis Ford Coppola’s surveillance masterpiece The Conversation, playing a woman apparently having an affair and being bugged by Gene Hackman while having the conversation on which the film hangs.

She first met Penny Marshall on a double date, then again at Coppola’s Zoetrope studio, where they were both hired as comedy writers. Penny’s brother Garry, who was producing Happy Days, invited them to appear in an episode.

They eventually appeared in five, and proved so popular that he commissioned the spin-off. At one point in its run Laverne & Shirley was the No 1-rated show in America, and when viewing figures started to dip the girls were relocated to Los Angeles, working in a shop.

But by the eighth series the wheels were starting to come off: Cindy Williams became pregnant and demanded time off, which annoyed the producers, while relations between her and Penny Marshall had begun to deteriorate, with Cindy Williams feeling that she was not being treated equably.

“There was a lot of pressure on us,” she recalled. “Did tempers flare? Yeah, from every direction.” She barely appeared for the rest of the series, and it limped on for the rest of the season, then was cancelled after 178 episodes.

(The two women were eventually reconciled, and reunited for a 2013 episode of the teen sitcom Sam & Cat on Nickelodeon, five years before Penny Marshall’s death aged 75.)

Cindy Williams’s later work included the short-lived sitcom Normal Life and the family comedy Getting By in the 1990s, as well as guest appearances in such shows as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. On stage she appeared in touring productions of plays including Grease and Deathtrap, and in 2007 she made her Broadway debut in The Drowsy Chaperone.

In her 2015 memoir Shirley, I Jest! she wrote of her strong Catholic faith. Last year she put on a one-woman show, Me, Myself and Shirley.

Cindy Williams married the singer and actor Bill Hudson in 1982. They divorced in 2000, and she is survived by their daughter and son.

Cindy Williams, born August 22 1947, died January 25 2023