The story in my family goes that my mother shoveled snow on my due date. As a public school teacher, she only had a couple weeks of maternity leave and she wasn't going to waste it. I was born in the deepening blizzard, right on time. By the time I was old enough to watch television, we had models for working women, like my mom. The first show I apparently ever expressed any interest in, "Happy Days," featured a prime example: Shirley Feeney.
"They don't teach you show business, so I became the next best thing: a waitress."
The Shirley of Cindy Williams, who died Jan. 25 at the age of 75, was streetwise, energetic and usually at the side of her best friend, roommate and colleague Laverne (Penny Marshall). The majority of Williams' appearances on "Happy Days" were in the middle of the show's long run. Set in Milwaukee during the 1950s and '60s, the show revolved around high schooler Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and his family, though another character, cool boy greaser The Fonz (Henry Winkler) soon proved to be the show's big draw.
Williams' character of Shirley, along with Laverne, got her own spinoff starting in 1976. By then, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" had been running for years, where Tyler played the associate producer of a television news show who happened to be a single woman. But Shirley was different from Moore; she was different from any woman on television at the time. She was unapologetically herself: a working class girl with big dreams.
A 2005 A & E Biography on "Laverne & Shirley" describes Williams' background as if taking a page from her most famous character, Shirley: "She didn't have Penny [Marshall]'s connections, but she found her own path to stardom." Born in California, Williams studied theater at Los Angeles City College. She said she had wanted to be a nurse, but she fainted during a frog dissection, and acting was the only other thing she loved.
"They don't teach you show business," Williams says in the documentary, "so I became the next best thing: a waitress." She appeared on a few commercials and TV shows in the '70s, before landing a role in "American Graffiti," her big film break.
Intended to be a one-time guest spot with Marshall – with whom Williams already had a strong friendship, having met Marshall on a film shoot – Laverne and Shirley were a hit on "Happy Days." When it came to their own spinoff show, the critics didn't love it. But viewers did, immediately.
Somehow, life hasn't made her hard. Somehow, Shirley keeps trying.
Both Laverne and Shirley were relatable, young women who worked (in their case, at a brewery in Milwaukee), who didn't have very much — or anything — handed to them. They were on their own, without family help or husbands. But Shirley always wanted more. From her very first episode in the show, in which the girls get invited to a "high society" party and the struggle to find appropriate dresses to wear is only the beginning, Shirley yearns. She's earnest and hopeful while still having one foot grounded in the reality of her life, which hasn't been easy.
Somehow, life hasn't made her hard. Somehow, Shirley keeps trying.
That hope exploded later in the show when the girls lose their jobs and move across the country to California, deciding to make a go of it there and maybe break into the movie business. Perhaps no state is more romantically hopeful in the American imagination than California, and what higher dreams can one girl from Wisconsin have than showbiz? As the years wore on, Williams did the often-demanding, over-the-top physical comedy of the show with beauty and grace. In one episode, famished at a party, she leaps onto a cracker on the carpet. A famous bit saw the two friends hung on coat hooks, unable to reach the floor or get down, and swinging wildly into each other.
In the show's eighth season, pregnant with her first child and worried about the physical demands of the intensely active show, Williams left. She filed a $20 million suit, which was later settled out of court, against Paramount for their demands she work on her due date.
In addition to TV and film work, which she returned to after "Laverne & Shirley," Williams was an accomplished stage actor. After appearing in multiple national tours, including of "Grease," she made her Broadway debut in 2007 in "The Drowsy Chaperone" at the age of 60. In 2015, she published a memoir "Shirley, I Jest!"
Girls who work don't stop working, never stop striving and that burning hope never seemed to leave Williams. In 2021, she toured with her one-woman show "Me, Myself, and Shirley" across the country. At the time of her death, more dates of her stage show had been planned for later this year.
