‘If I became the Fonz I’d shoot myself’

Press, 19 April 1982, Page 19

‘If I became the Fonz I’d shoot myself’

Henry Winkler, the man who has become a millionaire by being the sort df son every parent dreads producing, pushed his mane of soft, brown hair out of his eyes and said: “The Fonz is a dreadful warning to all parents. I pray Stacey and I don’t produce anything like him." He was talking about Arthur Fonzarelli — “The Fonz 0 of “Happy Days” — and about the show which in 10 years has taken Henry Winkler from bit-parts in TV commercials to international stardom. Today, Henry, now 37, still enjoys playing the motorbike tearaway of the fifties. “Another' five years will probably be the limit; Then we’ll have even less in common than we have now,” he said.

While Fonzie cuts a dash in skin-tight black leather, Henry likes muted tweeds. Fonzie tears around town on a motor-bike that roars like a jet engine. Henry prefers old cars. Undoubtedly the two of them are as different as chalk from cheese. Yet Henry insisted: “After 10 year of playing the Fonz I still like the guy. “My wife likes him, too. She even finds him sexy. But I have to confess that if I thought that any part of Fonzie was actually rubbing off on me in my private life, I’d shoot myself. “He’s the kind of guy I would have crossed to the other side of the street to avoid when I was a kid, because he would have made mincemeat of me, and I would have been scared stiff. I just wouldn’t have known how to handle him.” The son of a wealthy New York timber merchant, Henry was educated in America’s most expensive schools, and has the added distinction of an M.A. degree from Yale University. “I had wanted to act from the time I was seven years old,” he said. “I was quite shy as a kid, and it seemed' like the greatest-thing in the world to me to be able to make believe that you were someone else.

“Needless to say, my parents didn't approve of the idea, but they didn’t stand in my way. “And when I started out in the theatre playing mainly classical roles, they were even quite encouraging. But, when I first told them about the part of Fonzie, they were horrified,” he said. “Now,” he grinned, “my father keeps all the reviews and cuttings and my mother tells everyone she meets that I’m her son.” He got the part, he said, “by going to audition with a few dozen others.” He said he based his brilliant characterisation of the leather-jacketed, girl-pulling, high school drop-out of the ’fifties just by watching and listening to people around him. “That’s one thing that going to college taught me,” he explained. “How to

research a subject thoroughly. To play Fonzie, I watched dozens of movies featuring teen-agers of the period.

“So much of an actor’s life is observation — and anyway, apart from that, I enjoy going to different places and meeting different people. “There’s a ‘big star’ scene in Hollywood, with parties every night and it’s so incredibly boring that Stacey and I steer well clear of it” Stacey is his very attractive, red-haired wife, whom he met when she was doing public relations for a department store. “I was buying a jacket when I first saw her,” he recalled, “and I asked her if it suited me. She said it did, so I bought it. It had to be altered, so I went back for it the following week, and there she was again.” "Of course, there I was,” Stacey chipped in. "I fell for him the moment I met him, and on the night of our first date, I actually wrote to my parents and told them I was going to marry Henry Winkler. “Henry didn’t know it at the time, but I did!” In fact, when they married four years ago, millions of' Fonz-struck teen-agers weni into mourning (in black leather — what else?), de-

claiming that this was “the end.” Henry’s fanmail went down from 30,000 letters a week to half that number. Now, as a husband, stepfather to 10-year-old Jed by Stacey’s first marriage, and father to 18-month-old Zoe, his popularity has never been higher, and he receives about 50,000 fan letters'a week. “The nice thing is that I find now that kids actually tell me about themselves and their problems, and they also ask after Stacey and the family,” said Henry. In the meantime, however, when' not playing Fonzie, Henry has been doing a lot of work with handicapped children.

Last year he successfully produced a heart-rending documentary called “Run, Don’t Walk” — which deals with the plight of those who are, what he calls, “physically challenged.” “I tried to show that if you give an individual a challenge,- together with the right sort of encouragement, he can meet and beat it” (Features International).