If one were to count the number of times any American –or maybe anyone anywhere – laughed in the last half-century, the person responsible for more of those laughs than anyone else might well have been
Garry Marshall, who died Tuesday in Burbank, California. He was 81. Lawyer Martin Garbus, who was a childhood friend of Marshall’s, said he died after a series of strokes.
It would be difficult to overstate Marshall's effect on US entertainment. His work in network television and Hollywood movies fattened the archive of romantic, family and buddy comedies and consistently found the sweet spot in the middle of the mainstream. It might be said that Marshall, who worked with a-list stars such as Lucille Ball in the 1960s and Julie Andrews and Anne Hathaway in the early 21st century (he directed them in the coming-of-age-as-royalty film The Princess Diaries), was among the forces that directed that very mainstream. TV successes Beginning in the 1960s, his work in television alone included writing scripts for the well-remembered, star-driven comedies Make Room for Daddy (with Danny Thomas), The Lucy Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show and developing (with Jerry Belson) Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple into the television series that starred Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as the mismatched roommates Felix, a neatnik, and Oscar, a slob.
Marshall, with Joe Glauberg and Dale McRaven, created "Mork and Mindy," the show about a charmingly innocent, logorrheic space alien that made Robin Williams a star; Laverne and Shirley (with Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman), about a pair of blue-collar single women, one of whom was played by Marshall's younger sister Penny; and Happy Days, a fondly nostalgic parody of middle-American life in the 1950s and early 1960s featuring a roster of stereotypical teenagers, including Ron Howard and Henry Winkler.
Marshall began directing movies in the 1980s. Several were high-concept star vehicles that dealt with mismatched pairs: Nothing in Common (1986), a reconciliation story with Jackie Gleason and Tom Hanks as cantankerous father and resentful son; Overboard (1987), which proposes that a mean-spirited heiress with amnesia (Goldie Hawn) can be persuaded to believe she is the wife of a carpenter (Kurt Russell); and most famously Pretty Woman (1990), a Cinderella tale – and a gigantic hit – set in contemporary Los Angeles, about a hooker with a heart of gold (Julia Roberts) and her Prince Charming, a ruthless corporate raider (Richard Gere). "I like to do very romantic, sentimental type of work," Marshall said when Pretty Woman was released. "It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."
Casually blunt
As an actor, Marshall appeared frequently in small roles, cast usually to take advantage of his casually blunt manner and distinctly nasal Bronx accent, perhaps best exemplified by a scene in Albert Brooks' comedy Lost in America (1985), in which he played a Las Vegas casino manager whom Brooks harangues in an attempt to get him to return the money he lost gambling.
When Brooks says the casino could be like the Gimbels department store in the Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street, profiting from an act of beneficence, Marshall is the personification of flabbergasted. "In that movie, Santa Claus took care of everything," he says in the film. "There was Macy's, Gimbel's, but Santa Claus came and fixed the whole thing. We don't have Santa Claus."
"Not one laugh"
Garry Kent Marshall was born in the Bronx on Nov. 13, 1934. His father, who was born Anthony Masciarelli but changed the family name, made industrial films. Marshall recalled them in an interview in 2000 with the Archive of American Television. "The Story of Zinc, Smelting in the Pittsburgh Mill – we watched them," he said. "Not one laugh."
His mother, the former Marjorie Ward, was a dance teacher and the family wit who, Marshall said, introduced him to self-deprecating humor, “which became one of the great tools of humor throughout my career.”
“My mother was funnier than anybody I ever worked for,” he said in the 2000 interview, fingering his sport jacket. “My father was as funny as this coat. Not a laugh-a-minute, my father.”
As a boy, Marshall played baseball and basketball; a shortstop, he was known as Flip, he said, for the way he tossed the ball. He kept that name when he performed in comedy clubs, adding his father’s former surname, Masciarelli, which prefigured one of his best-known characters, Arthur Fonzarelli.
He attended Public School 80 and DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and graduated from Northwestern University, where, he recalled in a recent Wall Street Journal interview: "I realised words mattered and I studied journalism."
In 1956, Marshall joined the Army and served in South Korea before returning to New York, where he worked briefly for the Daily News, did his comedy routines at night and wrote jokes for comedian Joey Bishop and others. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. His survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Barbara; two sisters, Penny Marshall, the actor and director, and Ronny Hallin; and three children.
