Penny Marshall has died, at age 75, “due to complications from diabetes” — after having been diagnosed with lung and brain cancer in 2009 and then making a full recovery.
I didn’t know much about her early life and career:
Carole Penny Marshall was born in the Bronx. Her mother taught tap dancing, while her father directed industrial films. She attended the University of New Mexico for 2½ years. While there, Marshall got pregnant at 19, and soon thereafter married the father, a football player.
Marshall made her screen debut in 1968 with small roles in Richard Rush’s “The Savage Seven” and Jerry Paris’ “How Sweet It Is!,” on which her brother Garry was a writer. She also had small roles in Paris’ 1970 film “The Grasshopper,” but she found much more work on television, guesting on series including “That Girl,” “Love, American Style” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”
From 1972-74 she recurred on “The Odd Couple,” a show developed for TV by brother Garry, as Myrna, the schlumpy secretary employed by Jack Klugman’s Oscar Madison. (Marshall reprised the role for the 1993 reunion movie, “The Odd Couple: Together Again”).
She was a series regular on the critically acclaimed but short-lived CBS sitcom “Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers,” in which she played Janice, who frequently mocked her brother-in-law, played by Sand, for his romantic failures.
In 1975 she guested on “Mary Tyler Moore” but, more importantly, on “Happy Days,” where Marshall’s Laverne De Fazio and Cindy Williams’ Shirley Feeney first appeared on an episode where Fonzie chooses two girls from his little black book for a double date with Ron Howard’s Richie. (“Happy Days” was, like “The Odd Couple,” co-created by Penny’s brother Garry Marshall); letters to the show revealed that viewers liked the Laverne and Shirley characters, and when Garry Marshall was asked by then ABC programming exec Fred Silverman to come up with an idea for another sitcom with which to build a Tuesday night comedy block, he devised “Laverne & Shirley.”