She starred for eight seasons on the ABC ratings hit, created by her late brother Garry Marshall, and directed such films as 'Big,' 'A League of Their Own' and 'Awakenings.' 
 
 Penny Marshall, the nasally, good-natured Bronx native who starred on the ABC ratings sensation Laverne & Shirley before shattering records as a top-grossing female director in Hollywood, has died. She was 75. 
 
 The younger sister of the late writer-director-producer Garry Marshall and the first wife of actor-director Rob Reiner, Marshall died in her Hollywood Hills home on Monday night from complications from diabetes, her publicist Michelle Bega told The Hollywood Reporter. She was diagnosed with brain and lung cancer in 2009. 
 
 Marshall earned fame — but, incredibly not even one Emmy nomination — for playing the wisecracking Laverne DeFazio on the Happy Days spinoff created by her brother. Laverne & Shirley, which aired for eight seasons from 1976 to '83, centered on the escapades of two romantically challenged Milwaukee brewery workers, with Cindy Williams co-starring as Marshall's idealistic roommate, Shirley Feeney. 
 
 Marshall had directed a handful of episodes of the sitcom before she was approached to step in as a last-minute replacement for Howard Zieff to helm the feature comedy Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), starring Whoopi Goldberg. 
 
 She hit comedic pay dirt with her next film, Big (1988), the Tom Hanks starrer about a boy who wakes up in the body of an adult. Co-produced by James L. Brooks, who brought the script to Marshall, it was the first film directed by a woman to gross more than $100 million (about $198 million in today's dollars) domestically. 
 
 Another Marshall comedy, A League of Their Own (1992) — a fictional account about the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League organized during World War II that also starred Hanks (as well as Geena Davis, Rosie O'Donnell and Madonna) — broke through the $100 million barrier as well. 
 
 In between those films, the director dramatically changed course with the based-on-a-true-story Awakenings (1990), starring Robert De Niro as a middle-aged man who has been catatonic for 30 years and Robin Williams as a painfully shy doctor determined to "awaken" him. For Awakenings, Marshall became the second woman ever to helm a best picture Oscar nominee. She also is one of only seven to achieve that without landing a director nom as well. 
 
 "I had friends who said, 'Why do you want to be in a hospital for four months?' I said, 'I was depressed in a toy store, what difference does it make?'" Marshall told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. "I'm a depressed person. People said it was so brave to do a drama. I didn't think it was bravery. I figured I had an excuse: If it didn't work, I could say, 'Well, that's not my strength.'" 
 
 Carole Penny Marshall, named after actress Carole Lombard, was born Oct. 15, 1943. Her family lived on the Grand Concourse, a major thoroughfare in the Bronx. Her father, Anthony, made industrial films, and her mother, Marjorie, was a dance instructor who taught her youngest kid how to tap. 
 
 Marshall often noted that Garry, 10 years older than she, and her sister Ronny, six years her senior, were planned, while she was a mistake. As a teenager, her mother told her, "You were a miscarriage, but you were stubborn and held on." Her parents did not get along with each other. 
 
 (Garry died of complications from a stroke on July 19, 2016. He was 81.) 
 
 Following high school, she fled to the University of New Mexico to study psychology, got married in 1961, dropped out and had a daughter, Tracy, her only child (who later was adopted by Reiner). Divorced after two years, Marshall supported herself with an array of jobs, including a stint as a choreographer for the Albuquerque Civic Light Opera Association, before heading to Los Angeles in 1967. 
 
 "I didn't know my brother that well," she told Tavis Smiley in a 2012 interview. "So I went and said, 'Let me go meet him.' He was doing well. He was writing for Dick Van Dyke and Joey Bishop and every show, so why not meet him? 
 
 "He's a great guy. I wouldn't have a career without him. He told me go have lunch with this person, go take acting classes from this person. I said, 'Mommy wants me to change my name.' He said, 'Why?' 'Because she doesn't want me to embarrass the family.' (Laughter.) 'He said, 'Don't listen to her, she's nuts.'" 
 
 Supporting herself as a secretary while studying acting, she appeared in commercials. Her first was a Head & Shoulders spot opposite the gorgeous, blond and then-unknown Farrah Fawcett; Marshall played her plain roommate. 
 
 After appearing on such shows as That Girl and Love, American Style, Marshall and Reiner — mere months before they were to marry — auditioned for a new CBS sitcom. But while Reiner was cast as Michael Stivic, it was Sally Struthers who ended up playing his wife, Gloria, on All in the Family. 
 
 Marshall, though, soon joined her brother's ABC comedy The Odd Couple as Oscar Madison's flighty secretary, Myrna Turner. It was Jack Klugman, who played Oscar the sloppy sportswriter, who insisted she get the job. 
 
 Guest stints on such series as The Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and a regular role on the short-lived sitcom Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers (created by Brooks and Allan Burns) followed. 
 
 In 1975, she and Cindy Williams — who had met on a double date years earlier during a Liza Minnelli performance at L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel — were working on a satire for Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope magazine when Garry Marshall hired them for an episode of Happy Days. 
 
 Portraying "fast girls" recruited by Fonzie (Henry Winkler) for a double date with Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard), the two displayed an immediate comic rapport. So when ABC entertainment chief Fred Silverman asked the Happy Days creator if he had any ideas for a new show, he mentioned one starring his sister and Williams as Milwaukee's best. 
 
 "Fred Silverman was in his spinoff days," Garry Marshall said in a 2000 interview with the Archive of American Television. "[I pitched the show as] two girls from the other side of the tracks. There are no shows about blue-collar girls on the air. He said, 'It's on! What's its name?' 'I said, Laverne & Shirley.' 'Good, I love it!'" 
 
 "People were dying for someone that didn't look like Mary Tyler Moore, a regular person," he added. "My sister looks like a regular person, talks like a regular person." 
 
 The series, from Paramount Television, started out with the ladies living in a basement apartment and working as bottle cappers for the Schotz brewery in the 1950s. Marshall quaffed milk mixed with Pepsi and sported sweaters with a large, loopy "L" on them, and she and Williams performed physical shenanigans not seen since the days of I Love Lucy. 
 
 Laverne & Shirley debuted No. 1 in the ratings on Jan. 26, 1976, and, in its post-Happy Days spot at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, went on to become the highest-rated series for the 1977-78 and 1978-79 seasons. (Reiner's All in the Family was No. 2.) 
 
 "We [once] had a 60 share. That doesn't happen except for the Academy Awards or things like that, like the Super Bowl," Marshall told The Huffington Post in May 2013. "We beat out Jesus once, I remember that. It was Easter." 
 
 In mid-1979, Laverne & Shirley was sold into syndication for a record price, estimated to be $50,000 an episode. 
 
 In 1982, Williams sued Paramount for $20 million in a dispute over wanting to get paid while missing episodes because she was pregnant. After a settlement, she was written out of the series, and Laverne & Shirley wrapped after 178 episodes in May 1983 with only one Emmy nom ever — for costume design. 
 
 In 1978, Marshall starred opposite Reiner in the ABC telefilm More Than Friends, co-written by Reiner and based on the early days of their courtship. (Earlier, Reiner had played her fiance, named Sheldn (they forgot the "o" on his birth certificate, as the gag went), on The Odd Couple. 
 
 She and Reiner split up in 1979; afterward, she had a long romance with singer Art Garfunkel. 
 
 Marshall also had a minor role in the 1979 comedy 1941, directed by Steven Spielberg, and she did a cameo as a director in the 1995 movie adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Hollywood satire Get Shorty! 
 
 After A League of Their Own, Marshall directed Renaissance Man (1994), toplined by Danny DeVito and featuring Mark Wahlberg in his film debut; The Preacher's Wife (1996), with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston in what she once called "the first black Christmas movie"; and the Drew Barrymore starrer Riding in Cars With Boys (2001). 
 
 More recently, Marshall directed a couple of episodes of Showtime's United States of Tara and appeared on IFC's Portlandia (series star Fred Armisen hilariously impersonated her to promote her sassy 2012 memoir, My Mother Was Nuts) and the Fox sitcom Mulaney. 
 
 Marshall was one of Hollywood's most fervent Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers fans. She regularly was seen courtside at the Forum, the Sports Arena and then Staples Center, with her trademark tinted glasses perched precariously on her nose. 
 
 Her daughter played left fielder Betty Spaghetti in A League of Their Own. 
 
 Duane Byrge contributed to this report. ||||| Penny Marshall, who starred alongside Cindy Williams in the hit ABC comedy “Laverne & Shirley” and then became a successful director, died on Monday night at her Hollywood Hills home due to complications from diabetes, Variety has confirmed. She was 75. 
 
 Marshall was the first woman to direct a film that grossed more than $100 million, the first woman to direct two films that made more than $100 million, and she was only the second woman director to see her film Oscar-nominated for best picture. 
 
 “Laverne & Shirley” ran from 1976-1983 and proved an enormous success for ABC. It was the No. 3 show on television in 1975-76, No. 2 in 1976-77, and No. 1 in 1977-78 and 1978-79, spawning ancillary revenue in the form of merchandising, a record album, and an animated series based on the show. 
 
 Marshall began her directing career by helming several episodes of “Laverne & Shirley.” With little experience, she replaced Howard Zieff as director on her feature directorial debut, the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which grossed a respectable $30 million in 1986. Far more successful, however, was Marshall’s second outing, the 1988 sentimental comedy “Big,” which sported a subtle, delightful, Oscar-nominated performance from Tom Hanks — and hauled $151 million worldwide, reportedly becoming the first film directed by a woman to cross $100 million. 
 
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 Her third film, the critically acclaimed “Awakenings,” starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, and based on the Oliver Sacks book, reeled in $52 million and drew three Oscar nominations — including best picture and best actor for De Niro. The movie was only the second directed by a woman that was nominated for best picture (Randa Haines’ “Children of a Lesser God” was the first, in 1986). Roger Ebert said, “Because this movie is not a tearjerker, but an intelligent examination of a bizarre human condition, it’s up to De Niro to make Leonard not an object of sympathy, but a person who helps us wonder about our own tenuous grasp on the world around us.” 
 
 “A League of Their Own,” set in the world of women’s baseball during World War II, and starring Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell, made$132 million worldwide, including about $25 million overseas. The movie was selected in 2012 for inclusion in the National Film Registry, and it spawned a short-lived television adaptation. 
 
 Marshall’s run of extraordinary success ended with her next film, the critically derided “Renaissance Man,” which starred Danny DeVito as a reluctant instructor in the U.S. Army. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin began her review by declaring, “If you’re looking for a learning experience, ‘Renaissance Man’ is ready to teach you what the words simile, metaphor, oxymoron, and formula mean.” 
 
 She returned with some gusto with “The Preacher’s Wife,” starring Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston in a remake of a 1940s Christmas classic. The Times’ Stephen Holden was happy to declare, “The movie is a shrewdly conceived update of the 1947 comic heart-warmer ‘The Bishop’s Wife.'” After enumerating a few misgivings, he finished by saying, “All these loose ends don’t keep ‘The Preacher’s Wife’ from producing a mild feel-good glow.” The film made $48 million. 
 
 After five years, Marshall returned with her final film, 2001’s “Riding in Cars With Boys,” starring Drew Barrymore, which drew so-so reviews and about $35 million worldwide. Peter Rainer in New York magazine said, “Beverly is supposed to be a bad girl running with the wrong crowd, but most of the time she seems to be right out of a serioso episode of ‘Laverne & Shirley.'” 
 
 More recently she had directed two episodes of the ABC sitcom “According to Jim” in 2009; the 2010 TV movie “Women Without Men,” in which she also starred along with Lorraine Bracco, Dyan Cannon, and Roseanne Barr; and two episodes of Showtime’s “United States of Tara” in 2010 and 2011. 
 
 Marshall also produced a number of films, including many of her directing projects as well as Ron Howard’s “Cinderella Man,” starring Russell Crowe, and Nora Ephron’s feature adaptation of “Bewitched,” both in 2005. 
 
 But it all started, really, with “Laverne & Shirley.” 
 
 The show, which premiered in January 1976, scored in the ratings immediately. Within months of the series’ debut, Marshall and Williams were asked to record an album, “Laverne & Shirley Sing.” They sang one song from the album, a cover of the Crystals’ hit “Da Doo Ron Ron,” on a float during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that November. 
 
 An animated series, “Laverne & Shirley in the Army,” ran in ABC’s Saturday morning lineup in 1981, with Marshall and Williams voicing the characters. After 13 episodes, an animated Fonzie (voiced by Henry Winkler) and his dog were added, and the product was wedded to the animated version of “Mork & Mindy” to create “The Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour.” 
 
 The show inspired a line of tie-in merchandise, including Laverne, Shirley, Lenny, and Squiggy dolls, a board game, puzzles, and a great deal more. 
 
 Marshall and Williams also made crossover appearances — back on “Happy Days,” where they’d started; on the 1978 pilot of “Mork & Mindy” together with Winkler’s Fonzie; and on the brief Garry Marshall-created show “Blansky’s Beauties” in 1977. 
 
 Meanwhile, “Laverne & Shirley” itself evolved. The first five seasons were set in Milwaukee, with the two leads employed in a brewery; the sixth season relocated the characters to Burbank, Calif.; and then, in the eighth and final season, Williams and her husband feuded with Paramount, the producers, and Marshall when Williams became pregnant, resulting in her abrupt departure from the show, although no one agrees exactly who was to blame. Marshall and Williams did not speak to each other for several years, but eventually reconciled. 
 
 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 two and a half 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.) Letters to the show revealed that viewers liked the Laverne and Shirley characters, and when Garry 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.” 
 
 According to Marley Brant’s book “Happier Days: Paramount Television’s Classic Sitcoms 1974-1984,” Marshall and Williams had met on the set of the film “The Christian Licorice Store” in the late 1960s. Later “the two young women were hired as writers for a bicentennial spoof of American history that Francis Ford Coppola’s company was doing. The girls liked each other and became friends.” 
 
 Despite the advice of her brother Garry, who was offering to cast her in her own show, Penny was initially reluctant to take on “Laverne & Shirley.” But she did, and Williams, deciding it would be fun to work with her friend, agreed as well. 
 
 The chant of “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” that preceded Cyndi Grecco’s theme song “Making Our Dreams Come True” in the series’ opening montage was drawn from a song Marshall and her friends used to sing on the way to school. 
 
 Garry created, produced, directed, and wrote for the series. Penny starred, and she directed a few episodes. Their sister Ronny Hallin was the casting director, and their father, Anthony Marshall, was also a producer. 
 
 The various feuds related to the show were settled over the years, and “Good Morning America” hosted a reunion of the cast in 2012. 
 
 In a Yahoo blog post, Kimberly Potts wrote, “Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams reunited (and proved they’ve still got some serious physical comedy skills) for a 2013 episode of the Nickelodeon series ‘Sam & Cat,’ in which they played the warring creators of a 1970s TV series called ‘Salmon Cat.’ ‘Sam & Cat’ stars Jennette McCurdy and Ariana Grande re-created the iconic ‘L&S’ show opening for the episode.” 
 
 Her candid autobiography “My Mother Was Nuts” was published in 2012. 
 
 Marshall was apparently diagnosed with lung and brain cancer in 2009, but then she appeared to make a complete recovery. 
 
 She was twice married, the first time to Michael Henry from 1961-63, the second time to actor-director Rob Reiner from 1971-79. Both marriages ended in divorce. 
 
 She is survived by a daughter by Henry who was adopted by Reiner, actress Tracy Reiner, and Hallin, a TV director. Garry Marshall died in 2016. ||||| If there’s no crying in baseball, a few tears were shed for the first female director to break the $100 million gross mark with “Big” in 1988 — and then again four years later with “A League of Their Own.” Marshall carved her own niche in the male-dominated business of directing films while opening doors for other women.
– Penny Marshall, the legendary Laverne & Shirley actress turned iconic director, died Monday night at age 75. Her publicist confirms to the New York Daily News Marshall died "peacefully" at her Hollywood Hills home due to diabetes complications. Born in the Bronx to an industrial film director father and tap dance instructor mother, she left for the University of New Mexico after high school, but dropped out after two and a half years when she got pregnant and married the father of her child, Variety reports. After a series of jobs including a stint as a choreographer in Albuquerque, she left for Los Angeles in 1967, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Her brother Garry Marshall, 10 years her senior, was doing well in the entertainment industry, and with his encouragement, she studied acting and started getting roles in commercials, films, and television. She first played Laverne De Fazio in a guest spot on her brother's series Happy Days, which was well-received and ultimately led to her brother pitching Laverne & Shirley. It aired from 1976 to 1983, and Marshall began her directing career by directing some of its episodes. Her feature directorial debut was the Whoopi Goldberg-starring Jumpin’ Jack Flash in 1986; she went on to direct Tom Hanks in Big in 1988, which became the first female-directed film to gross more than $100 million. Her third film, Awakenings, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, was just the second female-directed film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar. She went on to direct many other films including A League of Their Own, which starred her only child, daughter Tracy, who was adopted by Rob Reiner during his 1971-79 marriage to Marshall. "Penny was a girl from the Bronx, who came out West, put a cursive 'L' on her sweater and transformed herself into a Hollywood success story," says a statement from her family.