Penny Marshall, who has died aged 75, was a rarity: a successful female film-maker in Hollywood. Her delightful comedy Big (1988), starring Tom Hanks, became the first film by a female director to gross more than $100m. Though it was the fifth body-swap movie to emerge in the space of a year, its success was richly deserved.
The plot, about a boy whose wish to be a grown-up comes true, could have been tasteless in other hands. There is, after all, a tentative romance between this child in an adult’s body (Hanks) and his colleague (Elizabeth Perkins) at the toy company where his natural naivety has landed him a job – though when she stays the night and he announces “I get to be on top!”, he is referring only to the bunk-bed arrangements. But Marshall’s light touch, and the appealingly puppyish performance she coaxed from Hanks, ensured the charm rarely waned.
The box-office triumph of Big was repeated with A League of Their Own (1992), in which Hanks played the manager of a women’s baseball team; Madonna and Geena Davis also starred. “Unfortunately everyone’s cycle synched up,” said Marshall. “The mood swings – that poor crew!”
In between, she made Awakenings (1990), based on the book of the same name in which the neurologist Oliver Sacks detailed his work with catatonic sufferers of “sleeping sickness”, or encephalitis lethargica. Though this film, too, was a hit, it was manipulative, simplistic and cloying, and showed its stars, Robin Williams (as the doctor) and Robert De Niro (as his patient), at their self-indulgent worst. Nevertheless, its Oscar nomination for Best Picture made Marshall only the second woman (after Randa Haines, director of Children of a Lesser God) to have a film in contention in that category.
Marshall had shot to fame as an actor, playing the goofy Laverne Defazio opposite Cindy Williams in Laverne & Shirley, a sitcom created by Marshall’s brother, Garry. (Later the director of films including Pretty Woman and Beaches, he predeceased her in 2016.) The series ran from 1976 until 1983; by its third season, it was the most watched TV show in the US. The characters, roommates who work together at a Milwaukee brewery, had made their initial appearance in 1975 on another of Garry Marshall’s sitcoms, the nostalgic Happy Days, where they went on a double date with The Fonz (Henry Winkler) and Richie (Ron Howard). They proved so popular that a spin-off was turned around in the space of just two months.
This in turn spawned its own animated series, Laverne & Shirley in the Army, in 1981, for which Marshall provided her character’s voice.
Laverne & Shirley relied increasingly on slapstick, allowing Marshall to indulge her early ambitions to be a stunt performer. She was nominated three times for Golden Globes for her work on the show, and attributed its success to the characters’ relative poverty and working-class backgrounds, which distinguished it from aspirational forebears such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Born Carole – Penny was her middle name – in the Bronx, New York City, she was the daughter of Marjorie (nee Ward), who ran a tap dancing school in the basement of the building where the family lived, and Anthony Marshall (born Masciarelli), an aspiring cartoonist who made industrial films. Living across the street was Rob Reiner, Marshall’s future husband and co-star, though they did not know each other at the time. “It was a very wide street,” she explained.
Much of her childhood was taken up with performing as part of her mother’s Rockettes-style dance troupe, The Marshallettes, three-time winners on the TV variety show Ted Mack & the Original Amateur Hour.
After Walton high school she studied maths and psychology at the University of New Mexico. She became pregnant there and was married briefly to the child’s father, Michael Henry, before moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.
Early roles included a shampoo commercial alongside Farrah Fawcett (Marshall was cast as “Homely Girl”) and the biker exploitation movie The Savage Seven, in which she played “an Indian with a Bronx accent”. She found work on some of her brother’s projects, including How Sweet It Is! (1968), a comedy he scripted co-starring James Garner and Debbie Reynolds, and his TV spin-off of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1972-74). It was there that she became Reiner’s wife on-screen as well as off.
She directed several episodes of Laverne & Shirley and of Working Stiffs (1979), a sitcom starring Michael Keaton and James Belushi as janitors. In 1986, she was asked at short notice to take over the Whoopi Goldberg caper Jumpin’ Jack Flash, which had lost its original director, Howard Zieff, early in production.
Her other films were Renaissance Man (1994), with Danny DeVito as an English teacher on an army base; The Preacher’s Wife (1996), a remake of the 1947 festive favourite The Bishop’s Wife, starring Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston; and an adaptation of Beverly Donofrio’s autobiography, Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), featuring Drew Barrymore as a teenage mother. Occasional returns to acting included the comic thriller The Hard Way (1991), the supernatural comedy Hocus Pocus (1993), where she appeared with her brother, the film-industry romp Get Shorty (1995), in which she briefly played herself, and the cult TV hit Portlandia (2012).
After surviving lung cancer, Marshall wrote a 2012 memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, in which she was candid about her drug use and the abortion she underwent in her 40s.
Both her marriages ended in divorce. Marshall is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Tracy Reiner, who took the surname of her adoptive father, and by a sister, Ronny.
• Carole Penny Marshall, actor, writer and director, born 15 October 1943; died 17 December 2018
