Henry Winkler ‘The Fonz’ not hindered by Dyslexia

Sep 30th, 2011 by Neo

One of my favourite actors is Henry Winkler. How that comes about was when I first watched Happy Days. It was like love at first sight. He role as the “Fonz”, a high school dropout and greaser, was like second nature to him. He fits right in into the macho type character.

Well, he was born on 30 October 1945 in Manhattan, New York. His father worked as a president of an international lumber company. He struggled through his studies from elementary to high school due a learning disability later he identified it as dyslexia.

His parents wants him to work with them in the lumber company but he has plans in his career as an actor. Incredibly he graduated form high school and further his studies in Emerson College and did a Master of Fine Arts degree in Yale School of Drama.

After Yale, he began his career in appearing in 30 commercials. His break came in 1974 where he played a role as a member of a Brooklyn gang in “The Lord’s of Flatbush”.

Following after that, he was in a new ABC series called “Happy Days”. In there he acted as a high school dropout and auto mechanic named Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli set in the 1950s. He was seldom seen in the first few episodes as ABC feared he would been noted as a hoodlum but he was very famous with his viewers. As the result of this the producers made his role more prominent. The show’s ratings went up and Fonzie became the 1970s icon of a cool guy. As he rose to fame, he did not become snobbish however he was seen to be humble.

As Happy Days series ended in 1984, he decided to pursue producing and directing. The prominent movies and TV shows that he produced and directed were “MacGyver”(1985), “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”(1996), “Scream”(1996), “The Waterboy”(1998), “The Practice”(1997), and “Arrested Development”(2003).

He was also an renown author as between 2003 and 2007 when he teamed up with Lin Oliver to write a “Hank Zipzer, the World’s Greatest Underachiever” which based on his early days of struggles with dyslexia. More than 2 million books were sold.

He married in 1978 to Stacey and has three children. They were into a lot of children charities. Recently in September 2011, he was confered with an honourary OBE from Queen Elizabeth II for his educational work on dyslexia in schools in UK.