Celebrity Biographies
Garry Marshall
The director of “Pretty Woman”, a movie that makes stories, and that the public likes to see over and over again, has died at the age of 81. Garry Marshall was characterized by directing kind stories with good feelings, which made the viewer feel great watching them.
“I’ve been a journalist. I’ve been a drummer. I’ve been everything,” New Yorker Garry Marshall, the son of a documentary filmmaker and the director of a dance school, once said in an interview. He loved to play jazz and trained to write in the media, going so far as to write his sports report for The New York Daily.
But he also had a talent for comedy, and in 1960 Jack Paar hired him to write funny skits for “The Tonight Show.” He thus began a long career in television, and Garry wrote for numerous sitcoms and small screen shows, some as popular as The Danny Thomas Show , The Lucy Show , and The Dick Van Dyke Show . He was behind the television adaptation of Neil Simon ‘s The Odd Couple , or Happy Days , which starred a youthful Ron Howard. In addition, as an actor, he had small interventions, he knew the trade. His sister Penny, who also became a director, counted on him for Ellas da coup. And for Robin Williams, he co-created the alien comedy Mork & Mindy .
He made his film directing debut in 1982 with Los locos del bisturí , a comedy, it couldn’t be otherwise. He was a specialist in genre, although sometimes he approached what is known as “dramedy”, and he always infused his stories with a very attractive romantic vein. This happened with overwhelming success in Pretty Woman (1991), a modern variation on Cinderella, where the girl who became a princess was a prostitute, and her prince charming was a wealthy businessman. Starring a perfect and not so strange couple, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, he would reunite them in Runaway Bride (1999), although the result was notably inferior.
He took a risk with more serious stories like Frankie & Johnny (1992), based on a play about the relationship between two waiters, played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino. Although he felt much more comfortable with stories that leave a good taste in the mouth, modern fairy tales, such as Princess by surprise and its sequel (2001 and 2004), where he boosted the career of Anne Hathaway in addition to having the veteran Julie Andrews .
In recent years, he produced a type of film around a holiday, and which brought together various minimally connected stories of sentimental and family crises that ended up being happily resolved, which can be seen in Historias de San Valentín (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011) and Happy Mother’s Day (2016), released the same year as her death.
Garry Marshall was happily married since 1963 to his wife Barbara, with whom he had a daughter, Ronnie, who gave him six grandchildren.