‘Laverne & Shirley’ actor had ‘a brilliant sense of humor,’ ‘glittering spirit’

LOS ANGELES — Cindy Williams, who was among the most recognizable stars in America in the 1970s and ’80s for her role as Shirley opposite Penny Marshall’s Laverne on the beloved sitcom Laverne & Shirley, has died, her family said Monday.

Williams died in Los Angeles at age 75 on Wednesday after a brief illness, her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, said in a statement released through family spokeswoman Liza Cranis.

“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.”

Williams worked with some of Hollywood’s most elite directors in a film career that preceded her full-time move to television, appearing in George Cukor’s 1972 Travels With My Aunt, George Lucas’ 1973 American

Gra∞ti and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation from 1974.

But she was by far best known for Laverne & Shirley, the Happy Days spinoff that ran on ABC from 1976 to 1983 that, in its prime, was among the most popular shows on TV.

Williams played the straitlaced Shirley Feeney to Marshall’s more libertine Laverne DeFazio on the show about a pair of blue-collar roommates who toiled on the assembly line of a Milwaukee brewery in the 1950s and ’60s.

“They were beloved characters,” Williams told The Associated Press in 2002.

DeFazio was quick-tempered and defensive; Feeney was naive and trusting. The actors drew upon their own lives for plot inspiration.

“We’d make up a list at the start of each season of what talents we had,” Marshall told the AP in 2002. “Cindy could touch her tongue to her nose, and we used it in the show. I did tap dance.”

Williams told the AP in 2013 she and Marshall had “very different personalities,” but tales of the two clashing during the making of the show were “a bit overblown.”

The series was the rare network hit about working-class characters, with its self-empowering opening song: “Give us any chance, we’ll take it; read us any rule, we’ll break it.”

That opening would become as popular as the show itself. Williams’ and Marshall’s chant of “schlemiel, schlimazel” as they skipped together became a cultural phenomenon and oft-invoked piece of nostalgia.

Marshall, whose brother, Garry Marshall, co-created the series, died in 2018.

The show also starred Michael McKean and David Lander as Laverne and Shirley’s oddball hangers-on, Lenny and Squiggy. Lander died in 2020.

Williams was born one of two sisters in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles in 1947. Her family moved to Dallas soon after she was born but returned to Los Angeles, where she would take up acting while attending Birmingham High School and major in theater arts at LA City College.

Her acting career began with small roles in television starting in 1969, with appearances on Room 222, Nanny and the Professor and Love, American Style.

Last year, Williams appeared in a one-woman stage show full of stories from her career, Me, Myself and Shirley, at a theater in Palm Springs, Calif., near her home in Desert Hot Springs.

Williams was married to singer Bill Hudson of musical group the Hudson Brothers from 1982 until 2000. Hudson was father to her two children. He was previously married to Goldie Hawn and is also the father of actor Kate Hudson.