Cindy Williams of 'Laverne & Shirley' dies at age 75

Cindy Williams, who played Shirley opposite Penny Marshall's Laverne on the popular sitcom "Laverne & Shirley," has died, her family said Monday.

Williams died in Los Angeles at age 75 on Wednesday after a brief illness, her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, said in a statement released through family spokeswoman Liza Cranis.

"The passing of our kind, hilarious mother, Cindy Williams, has brought us insurmountable sadness that could never truly be expressed," the statement said. “Knowing and loving her has been our joy and privilege. She was one of a kind, beautiful, generous and possessed a brilliant sense of humor and a glittering spirit that everyone loved.”

During an interview with The Desert Sun in 2022, Williams said she was living in Desert Hot Springs.

Williams also starred in director George Lucas' 1973 film “American Graffiti” and director Francis Ford Coppola's “The Conversation" from 1974.

In the Coachella Valley:'The buck stops here': Cindy Williams brought her one-woman show to the Annenberg Theater

"American Graffiti" was shot in Petaluma on a budget of $777,000. It was an unexpected box-office hit, taking in $115 million and making it one of the most profitable films of all time. The film also received many Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Williams said the film was a "brilliant idea," adding that Lucas first described it to her and Howard as a musical because the music never stops unless car radios are taken away, adding it has a "fabulous soundtrack" that becomes a character in the film.

"Two weeks into the movie, George had us come and see a 20-minute assemblage of the film with the music in it, and after the cast came and saw it, there was silence in the room and Harrison Ford said something about how it was great," Williams said. "He was right, and we couldn't believe that was the movie we were in.

But she was by far best known for “Laverne & Shirley," the “Happy Days” spinoff that ran on ABC from 1976 to 1983 that in its prime was among the most popular shows on TV.

Williams played the straitlaced Shirley to Marshall's more libertine Laverne on the show about a pair of roommates that worked at a Milwaukee bottling factory in the 1950s and 60s.

Even during the '70s, there were censors assigned to every TV show airing during prime time and things they couldn't say, do or improvise. But Williams said that often "made the show better" and that the show had "smart writers."

"We didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beautiful thing about the censors, because in the end it was (written) for everyone," Williams said. "Instead of talking about getting romantic with someone, we'd use the term 'vo-dee-o-dodo' and it made the show funnier because everybody got it, and parents could sit there with their kids and watch it."

Another challenge was memorizing her lines. Williams lived with dyslexia and said it wasn't properly diagnosed while she was growing up. The disorder, which makes reading and writing difficult, also came out in the way she spoke. It was often a source of tension between her and co-star Penny Marshall on the set of "Laverne and Shirley."

"It takes me longer during rehearsals to learn everything and get the script out of my hand, and (Marshall) would be smoking a cigarette on the first day, throw the script down and she'd already know it," Williams said. "That would cause rough patches. We also got into it over things we didn't agree about, but we never brought it on stage with us."

Marshall, whose brother, Garry Marshall, co-created the series, died in 2018.

“Laverne & Shirley” was known almost as much for its opening theme as the show itself. Williams' and Marshall's chant of “schlemiel, schlimazel" as they skipped together became a cultural phenomenon and oft-invoked piece of nostalgia.

In recent years, she performed an intimate, tell-all one-woman show "Me, Myself and Shirley" about the highs and lows of her life working in the TV and film industry. The show had its West-Coast premiere last year at the Annenberg Theater in Palm Springs.

"It's challenging to write it, put it in an order that is going to flow, and be 90 minutes worth of people's time," Williams said "Hopefully, people will come out laughing and feel thoroughly entertained. That's a responsibility I lay awake at night thinking about and then think, 'I better get some sleep so I'm able to perform this.'"

Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Cindy Williams of 'Laverne & Shirley' dies at age 75