Penny Marshall, left, and Cindy Williams as the title characters in the ABC sitcom “Laverne & Shirley.” Ms. Marshall’s success on the show paved the way for her directing career.
· Dec. 18, 2018
Penny Marshall, the nasal-voiced co-star of the slapstick sitcom “Laverne & Shirley” and later the chronically self-deprecating director of hit films like “Big” and “A League of Their Own,” died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 75.
Her publicist, Michelle Bega, said the cause was complications of diabetes. Ms. Marshall had in recent years been treated for lung cancer, discovered in 2009, and a brain tumor. She announced in 2013 that the cancer was in remission.
Ms. Marshall became the first woman to direct a feature film that grossed more than $100 million when she made “Big” (1988). That movie, a comedy about a 12-year-old boy who magically turns into an adult (Tom Hanks) and then has to navigate the grown-up world, was as popular with critics as it was with audiences.
The Washington Post said it had “the zip and exuberance of a classic romantic comedy.” The Los Angeles Times described it as “a refreshingly grown-up comedy” directed “with verve and impeccable judgment.” Mr. Hanks received his first Oscar nomination for his performance.
Four years later she repeated her box-office success with “A League of Their Own,” a sentimentally spunky comedy about a wartime women’s baseball league with an ensemble cast that included Madonna, Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell and Mr. Hanks.
In between, she directed “Awakenings” (1990), a medical drama starring Robert De Niro as a patient coming out of an encephalitic trance and Robin Williams as the neurologist who helps him. “Awakenings,” based on a book by Oliver Sacks, was only moderately successful financially, but Mr. De Niro received an Academy Award nomination.
A writer for Cosmopolitan magazine once commented that Ms. Marshall “got into directing the ‘easy’ way — by becoming a television superstar first.” That was a reference to her seven seasons (1976-83) as Laverne DeFazio, the brasher (yet possibly more vulnerable) of two young roommates, brewery assembly-line workers, on the hit ABC comedy series “Laverne & Shirley,” set in 1950s and ’60s Milwaukee.
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In Hollywood Ms. Marshall had a reputation for instinctive directing, which could mean endless retakes. But she was also known for treating filmmaking as a team effort rather than a dictatorship.
That may or may not have been a function of her self-effacing personality, which colleagues and interviewers often commented on. But in 1992 Ms. Marshall confessed to The New York Times Magazine that she wasn’t completely guileless.
“I have my own way of functioning,” she said. “My personality is, I whine. It’s how I feel
inside. I guess it’s how I use being female, too. I touch a lot to get my way and say, ‘Pleeease, do it over here.’ So it can be an advantage — the anti-director.”
That attitude was also an essential aspect of her humor. When Vanity Fair asked her to identify her greatest regret, she said, “That when I was a size 0, there was no size 0.”
Ms. Marshall in 2011. She became the first woman to direct a feature film that grossed more than $100 million when she made “Big” in 1988.CreditFrederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Carole Penny Marshall was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in the Bronx and grew up there, at the northern end of the Grand Concourse. Her father, Anthony, was an industrial filmmaker, and her mother, Marjorie (Ward) Marshall, taught dance. The family name had been changed from Masciarelli.
After she graduated from Walton High School, in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, Ms. Marshall attended the University of New Mexico. There she met and married Michael Henry, a college football player. They had a daughter, but the marriage lasted only two years, and Ms. Marshall headed for California, where her older brother, Garry, had become a successful comedy writer.
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She made her film debut in “The Savage Seven,” a 1968 biker-gang drama, and had a small part the same year in “How Sweet It Is!,” a romantic comedy starring Debbie Reynolds and James Garner.
Ms. Marshall continued acting, mostly playing guest roles on television series, until she got her big break in 1971, when she was cast in the recurring part of Jack Klugman’s gloomy secretary, Myrna Turner, on the ABC sitcom “The Odd Couple.” Her brother, a producer of the show, got her the job, but nepotism had nothing to do with it when viewers fell in love with her poker-faced humor and Bronx-accented whine.
That same year she married Rob Reiner, who was then a star of the hit series “All in the Family.” He adopted her daughter, but they divorced in 1979, when “Laverne & Shirley” and Ms. Marshall were at the height of their television popularity.
That series grew out of a 1975 episode of “Happy Days,” in which Laverne (Ms. Marshall) and Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams), two fast blue-collar girls, turned up at the local hangout as blind dates for Richie Cunningham and Fonzie, the two lead characters.
When “Laverne & Shirley” ended in 1983, after considerable on-set conflict between the co-stars and a final season without Ms. Williams, it was the first time in 12 years that Ms. Marshall had not had at least a relatively steady job on a television series.
She began making a handful of films and television appearances. Then Whoopi Goldberg, a friend, asked her to take over for a director she wasn’t getting along with on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), a comic spy caper. (Ms. Marshall had directed a few episodes of “Laverne & Shirley.”) The movie was far from an unqualified success, but it led to “Big.”
Robert Loggia, left, and Tom Hanks starred in the 1988 film “Big,” directed by Ms. Marshall. A story of a 12-year-old boy who magically turns into an adult, it was as popular with critics as it was with audiences.CreditBrian Hamill/20th Century Fox
Ms. Marshall’s two films after “A League of Their Own” were not as well received. “Renaissance Man” (1994), starring Danny DeVito as an adman turned teacher of Army recruits, was savaged by critics and earned only about $24 million, considerably less than it cost to make, in the United States (in contrast, “Big” earned almost $115 million). “The Preacher’s Wife” (1996), a remake of the heartwarming 1947 fantasy romance “The Bishop’s Wife,” starred Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. Critics found it likable but weak, and it brought in just under $50 million domestically.
Ms. Marshall did not direct again until 2001. “Riding in Cars With Boys,” a saga of teenage motherhood starring Drew Barrymore, earned mostly positive reviews but was a box-office disappointment. It was the last film Ms. Marshall directed. Her farewell to television direction was a 2011 episode of the multiple-personalities series “United States of Tara.”
She devoted some time to producing, notably with the 2005 movie inspired by the classic sitcom “Bewitched,” and took on the occasional acting job, including a 2012 guest spot on the series “Portlandia” and voice-over narration in the film “Mother’s Day” (2016), directed by Garry Marshall, who died in 2016.
In 2012 she published a best-selling memoir, “My Mother Was Nuts,” which began in her characteristically self-effacing way:
“I’m not someone who’s had to deal with much personal drama outside of the usual: growing up with parents who hated each other, two marriages and divorces, the ups and downs of various relationships, raising a daughter and watching friends crack up and overdose. There was the cancer thing, too. As you can see, though, there’s nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that most people don’t go through, nothing that says, ‘Penny, you were lucky to get through that one.’ ”
Her final screen appearance was on the new version of “The Odd Couple,” in a November 2016 episode that was a tribute to her brother, and featured cameos by stars from his many hit series.
Ms. Marshall, who lived in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, is survived by her older sister, Ronny; a daughter, the actress Tracy Reiner; and three grandchildren.
Critics sometimes accused Ms. Marshall of being overly sentimental, but she never apologized for that side of her work.
“I like something that tells a story or that tells me something I didn’t know,” she told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1992 when asked about her taste in films. “It should have humor in it — or it should have heart.”
“And if it doesn’t,” she added, with what the reporter described as a sly grin, “I’ll make it have heart.”
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He was also a legendary playboy — and an often emotionally and physically abusive man who seduced and harassed scores of actresses.
#MeToo - A year of progress amid a backlash
Before there was #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, there was Howard Hughes, a film producer, owner of RKO Pictures in the late 1940s through the 1950s, and one of the world’s richest men.
He was also a legendary playboy — and an often emotionally and physically abusive man who seduced, harassed and cajoled scores of famous actresses, including Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Lana Turner and more, as Karina Longworth reveals in her new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood (Custom House), out now.
Ava Gardner recalled Howard Hughes as a great lover, referring to him as the man who “taught me that making love didn’t always have to be rushed.” But his anger often eclipsed his passion, as Gardner, then in her early 20s, learned the hard way after refusing to accompany Hughes’ driver to pick him up from the airport.
Howard Hughes with actress and dancer Ginger Rogers in the early 40s.Source:News Corp Australia
After telling Hughes she had been with her ex-husband, actor Mickey Rooney, instead, Hughes lost control.
“He swung at her, and the next thing she knew, she had fallen back into a chair. Then, she recalled, Hughes ‘jumped at me and started to pound on my face until it was a mess,’ ” Longworth writes.
Gardner, however, fought back. She found an “ornamental bronze bell” on the mantelpiece, picked it up and struck him on his face, splitting his forehead open and knocking loose two teeth.
Livid at what he’d done to her, Ava continued the beating while Howard was down, grabbing a chair and hitting him some more. Finally, her maid walked in and put a stop to it.
Katharine Hepburn in the 1933 film Christopher Strong, a few years before Howard Hughes taught her to fly.Source:News Corp Australia
Hughes and actress Katharine Hepburn, Longworth writes, were “kindred spirits” who would “skinny-dip [by] diving off the wing of a seaplane in the middle of Long Island Sound.” They also shared a robust sex life, with Hepburn calling him “the best lover I ever had.”
Bette Davis was equally enamoured, if not entirely impressed, with Hughes’ seductions.
“I was the only one who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax, or so he said at that time,” she once claimed.
“I believed it when he told me that. I was wildly naive at the time. It may have been his regular seduction gambit. Anyway, it worked with me, and it was cheaper than buying gifts. But Howard Huge, he was not.”
Hughes and Ginger Rogers’ on-again/off-again love affair lasted years, with Hughes gifting her a 5-carat emerald engagement ring in 1940 and telling her he would build her a mansion. Soon, though, he demanded that Rogers be available for him whenever he desired, and “she [began] to suspect he was having her followed and that her phone calls were being surveilled.”
After Hughes blamed Rogers for a car accident she wasn’t even in — she had refused to accompany him to a dental appointment, and he was so angry about this that he crashed his car — she finally broke it off.
“Howard wanted to get himself a wife, build her a house and make her a prisoner in her own home while he did what he pleased,” Rogers later wrote. “Thank heavens I escaped that.”
As Hughes got older, his targets became younger, his controlling nature, more severe.
Hughes was 35 when he met Faith Domergue, then 16 and an actress under contract with Warner Bros., at a party on his yacht. After taking her out for a private sail, Hughes pursued her relentlessly.
While she initially had no interest, he wore her down and proposed marriage three months later, giving her a diamond ring and telling her, “You are the child I should have had.” In time, his pet name for her became “Little Baby”; her loving nickname for him was “Father Lover.”
The pair never married — proposals, it turned out, were a primary tool in Hughes’ seduction arsenal — but within weeks of his proposal, he purchased her contract from Warner Bros.
“Suddenly, within a matter of days,” Domergue later recalled, “I and my emotional and professional destiny were completely in his hands.”
Hughes scheduled her life so completely, from acting lessons to school tutoring, that he controlled it all.
Hughes with actress Ida Lupino in 1940.Source:News Corp Australia
He hired her a full-time driver who was charged with writing down everywhere she went.
He also moved her parents into a house around the corner from him, charming (and bribing) them with his largesse and giving her father and grandfather jobs in his factories.
Soon, she no longer had friends, wasn’t allowed to drive herself anywhere, was trapped alone — Hughes rarely returned home — in a 30-room mansion she found haunted and creepy, and had her family completely in Hughes’ debt.
Hughes, who carried on with Gardner, Turner and a then-teenage Gloria Vanderbilt while still with Domergue, would never marry her or make her a star.
He didn’t cast her in a movie for years and since he owned her contract, she couldn’t act for anyone else. Whenever she tried to leave him, Hughes would appeal to her mother, who would pressure her into staying.
Years later, Domergue wrote an autobiography that was never published. Longworth suggests that the evidence points to the book having been killed by people connected to Hughes.
But if his relationship with Domergue became a cautionary tale for young actresses, for Hughes, it was a template.
Whenever he saw a picture of a pretty teenage actress, he sought to get her under contract — and under his full control — right away, installing them in his apartments, scheduling every moment of their lives and hiring each a personal driver who was also his spy.
He would then leave very specific demands for how these women were to be handled, some of which revealed odd sexual proclivities.
“If we saw a bump in the road, we were supposed to slow down to a maximum speed of 2 miles an hour and crawl over the obstruction so as not to jiggle the starlet’s breasts,” a Hughes driver named Ron Kistler later revealed.
“Hughes was one of the world’s consummate t-t men, and he was convinced that women’s breasts would sag dangerously unless treated gently and supported at all times.”
Stories of Hughes’ pursuits are a litany of creep, including that of actress Terry Moore when he was 43 and she was 19.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in a scene from the 2004 film The Aviator.Source:AFP
As she wouldn’t sleep with him until they were married, Hughes married her on a boat — but did so in international waters.
Records of the wedding mysteriously disappeared after the ceremony, and the dispute over whether they were ever really married led to a years-long legal battle after his death.
When Hughes saw a picture of 23-year-old Italian beauty Gina Lollobrigida in 1950, his representatives offered plane tickets for her and her husband to fly to LA to meet Hughes, but sent only one ticket.
When she arrived in LA, believing it to be the beginning of a career in Hollywood, she was provided a hotel room with guards outside her door.
“Unless accompanied by Howard, she wasn’t allowed to leave the room, and Hughes had arranged with the front desk to block her phone calls,” Longworth writes.
When Lollobrigida finally had the chance to talk “business” with Hughes after a month and a half as a virtual captive, he tried to persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him.
She demanded a plane ticket home but before she left, Hughes insisted on throwing her a goodbye party.
At around 3am, he then persuaded a drunken Lollobrigida to sign a contract.
While she went on to become a major star in Europe, her fame did not immediately cross the ocean because due to the contract she had signed, she was forbidden for years from working in America for anyone but Hughes. Given his behaviour, she refused to work with him.
Hughes, famously reclusive and mentally ill in his later years, died in 1976 at age 70.
“By the end of Hughes’ life, when he was a codeine addict who spent his days and nights nodding in front of the TV, ” writes Longworth, “the former star aviator playboy would suddenly perk up when an actress he had once spent time with appeared on the screen.
“Hughes would allegedly call over one of his many aides, point and say, ‘Remember her?’ and then drift off into a grinning daydream of better days, days when his power to draw women to him and control not just their emotions but their movements, appearances and identities was apparently limitless.”
This story originally appeared on the New York Post and is republished here with permission.
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Spider-Man
Far From Home trailer description: Spidey, Mysterio are allies, Venice gets
decimated
While the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer
wasn’t released online following the Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel
trailers, a detailed description has emerged. Read it here.
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Tom Holland presents Spider-Man: Far From Home
trailer at the Brazil Comic Con.
Falling one step short
of a complete takeover of the internet, Marvel Studios did not release the
trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home after the one-two punch of Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame -
but they did screen it for fans.
The trailer was shown
before an ecstatic crowd at the Brazil Comic Con, where stars Tom Holland and
Jake Gyllenhaal were presented on stage. Those in attendance have shared
detailed descriptions of what they saw.
According to reports
on Collider and IGN, the trailer opens with the suggestion that Happy Hogan
(Jon Favreau) might have the hots for Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Fans would
remember that in Spider-Man: Homecoming, a possible romance between Tony Stark
and Aunt May was teased, but the film’s ending - Tony’s proposal to Pepper
Potts - put an end to that storyline.
The setting then
changes, as had been rumoured, to Europe. Peter and his friends - Michelle, Ned
and Flash - have gone to Venice for a summer camp. While packing his clothes,
Peter chooses to leave his suit at home, making an attempt at a normal teenage
life. It is still unclear when the film is set, because Peter had been reduced
to dust in Avengers: Infinity War’s famous The Decimation.
At his Venice hotel
room, which he is sharing with Ned, Peter is paid a visit by none other than
Nick Fury, who wants his help with an incoming threat. Fury gives Peter a new
suit and we then see shots of a major action scene in Venice.
At the end of the
trailer, we catch a glimpse of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio, but in a twist, it
appears as if he isn’t the villain, but a possible ally. The two join forces
(perhaps briefly) to take on mysterious alien creatures known as Elementals.
Marvel president Kevin
Feige had spoken to IGN about the Spidey sequel earlier. “What is it like to
try to go back to a normal life after what happens in (Infinity War)? Not to
mention what happens in the next movie. It’s fun to see that, because he can
represent, you know, the world as a whole, as they try to move forward,” Feige
said. “And you can do it in a way that is tonally unique, and tonally different
than, certainly, the two Avengers films.”
Producer Amy Pascal
had previously revealed that Far From Home will begin ‘a few minutes after’ the
events of Avengers: Endgame, suggesting perhaps that Spidey will return from
the dead in some manner. “What I think we should focus on is this Spider-Man
who started in Civil War and then has this movie, and then will be in the
Avengers movie. And we are starting now the next one which will start a few minutes
after Avengers 4 wraps as a story,” Pascal had said.
Spider-Man: Far From
Home is a direct sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming. It is directed by Jon Watts
and has been slated for a July, 2019 release.
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