Career
After college, Williams began her professional career by landing national commercials, which included Foster Grant sunglasses and TWA. Her first roles in television, among others, were on Room 222, Nanny and the Professor and Love, American Style.
Williams picked up important film roles early in her career: George Cukor's Travels with My Aunt (1972); as Ron Howard's high school sweetheart in George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973); and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974). She auditioned for Lucas's next project, Star Wars, but lost the role of Princess Leia to Carrie Fisher.
In 1975, Williams was cast as a fun-loving brewery worker, Shirley Feeney, in an episode of Happy Days, alongside Penny Marshall, who played her best friend/roommate Laverne De Fazio. The girls were introduced as female companions of Fonzie (Henry Winkler), and their appearance proved so popular that Garry Marshall, producer of Happy Days and Penny Marshall's brother, commissioned a spin-off for the characters. Williams continued her role on the very successful Laverne & Shirley from 1976 until 1982. Although praised for her portrayal of Shirley, Williams left the show after the second episode of the show's eighth and final season, after she became pregnant with her first child. Williams and co-star Marshall had also been feuding for quite some time, and this had also spurred her decision to leave.
In 1990, Williams returned to series TV in the short-lived CBS sitcom Normal Life, and a couple years later, reunited with former Laverne & Shirley producers Thomas L. Miller and Robert L. Boyett to star in their family sitcom Getting By (1993–94). She has guest starred on several television shows, including two episodes of 8 Simple Rules.
She has performed onstage in the national tours of Grease, Deathtrap and Moon Over Buffalo, and a regional production of Nunsense. She reunited with her L&S co-star Eddie Mekka in a November 2008 regional production of the Renée Taylor-Joseph Bologna comedy play It Had to Be You.
Williams made her Broadway debut as daffy "Mrs. Tottendale" in The Drowsy Chaperone at the Marquis Theatre on December 11, 2007, succeeding JoAnne Worley in the role originated by Georgia Engel.
She made a guest appearance on illusionist David Copperfield's first CBS TV special in 1978. She assisted Copperfield in the Zig Zag Girl and a length-wise sawing-in-half illusions.
Williams was co-producer on the successful Steve Martin comedy film Father of the Bride and its sequel.
Read more about this topic: Cindy Williams
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)