Penny Marshall went to her grave regretting that she didn’t mend her broken bond with co-star Cindy Williams until years after Laverne & Shirley ended. “We were both stubborn and refused to give in,” Penny said before her death at 75 on Dec. 17 from diabetes complications. According to sources, the two were so competitive their agents stood in the wings with stopwatches timing how long each one was on camera! “Each was paranoid that the other would be seen as a bigger star,” tattled an insider close to the hit sitcom that ran from 1976 to 1983. Despite that, they were very close — until Cindy married musician Bill Hudson, who started to make demands about how the show would handle her pregnancy. Read on for details of Penny’s lingering disappointments s and click here for more star’s dying regrets….
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“Bill was a pain in the a--,” Penny once groused. “She was having a baby. She thought he was being protective — but he wanted to be a producer. So
that's what happened.” The two actresses didn’t speak for decades before reuniting in 2013 on the Nickelodeon show,
Sam & Cat, with
Jennette McCurdy and
Ariana Grande.
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“It was like they were never apart,” divulged a source. “They were immediately like sisters again. Penny was haunted by that, because she realized they lost nearly a lifetime of friendship over something they could have worked out years ago.” (The two appear here with their co-stars David L. Lander and Michael McKean.)
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Penny — the director of “Big” and “A League of Their Own” — was also troubled for years by a dark secret that she only shared with those closest to her: a late-in-life abortion! “I 40-something years old,” Penny recalled. “I had a kid already and my womb wasn’t crying out.
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"I talked to
my brother,
Garry, and we weighed the pros and cons," she continued. “My pal
Joe Pesci even offered to be the father and help me raise the child, but I didn’t want to do that to him.”
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Photo credit: Getty Images
The
cancer survivor never revealed the father or the guilt she carried for the rest of her days, according to a source. Penny shared a longtime friendship with
Carrie Fisher. The two were so tight they were rumored to be lesbian lovers!
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Photo credit: InStar
“Bill was a pain in the a--,” Penny once groused. “She was having a baby. She thought he was being protective — but he wanted to be a producer. So
that's what happened.” The two actresses didn’t speak for decades before reuniting in 2013 on the Nickelodeon show,
Sam & Cat, with
Jennette McCurdy and
Ariana Grande.
Photo credit: Getty Images
“It was like they were never apart,” divulged a source. “They were immediately like sisters again. Penny was haunted by that, because she realized they lost nearly a lifetime of friendship over something they could have worked out years ago.” (The two appear here with their co-stars David L. Lander and Michael McKean.)
Photo credit: Getty Images
Penny — the director of “Big” and “A League of Their Own” — was also troubled for years by a dark secret that she only shared with those closest to her: a late-in-life abortion! “I 40-something years old,” Penny recalled. “I had a kid already and my womb wasn’t crying out.
Photo credit: Getty Images
"I talked to
my brother,
Garry, and we weighed the pros and cons," she continued. “My pal
Joe Pesci even offered to be the father and help me raise the child, but I didn’t want to do that to him.”
Photo credit: Getty Images
The
cancer survivor never revealed the father or the guilt she carried for the rest of her days, according to a source. Penny shared a longtime friendship with
Carrie Fisher. The two were so tight they were rumored to be lesbian lovers!
Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images
