Henry Winkler Recalls ‘Humiliating and Shameful’ Happy Days Table Reads Before His Dyslexia Diagnosis

Kimberly Roots
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Undiagnosed dyslexia gave an emotionally painful, frustrating edge to Henry Winkler’s time on Happy Days, the actor writes in a new memoir.

In People‘s excerpt from his book Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond, Winkler, 77, shares that he was diagnosed with the learning disorder at 31. So when he was playing Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli on the ABC sitcom in his late 20s, he didn’t know why getting through his scripts was such a troubling process.

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“Even in the midst of Happy Days, at the height of my fame and success, I felt embarrassed, inadequate,” he writes. He recalls the weekly table reads, during which the cast would gather to run through the script for the episode ahead. “At every reading I would lose my place, or stumble. I would leave a word out, a line out,” he writes. “I was constantly failing to give the right cue line, which would then screw up the joke for the person doing the scene with me.”

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He adds that though “Everybody in the cast was warm and supportive,” he felt awful when they would wait on him to figure out his lines: “It was humiliating and shameful… I constantly felt I was letting them down.”

Winkler’s portrayal of The Fonz nabbed him three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He eventually won an Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Emmy in 2018 for his work as Barry‘s Gene.

Being Henry will be published on Tuesday, Oct. 31, by Celadon Books.

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