Henry Winkler Reveals Dyslexia Battle On The ‘Happy Days’ Set In His New Book

Henry Winkler, now 77, has recounted his struggles with reading his lines on his hit 1970s sitcom Happy Days because of his dyslexia.

In an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond, Winkler wrote that he was “so f—ing angry” when he was diagnosed at age 31, when he was already a cultural icon for his role as Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli.

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“Even in the midst of Happy Days, at the height of my fame and success, I felt embarrassed, inadequate,” Winkler wrote in an excerpt in People. “Every Monday at 10 o’clock, we would have a table reading of that week’s script, and at every reading I would lose my place, or stumble. I would leave a word out, a line out. 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. Or I would be staring at a word, like ‘invincible,’ and have no idea on earth how to pronounce it or even sound it out.”

Winkler added, “My brain and I were in different zip codes. Meanwhile, the other actors would be waiting, staring at me: It was humiliating and shameful. Everybody in the cast was warm and supportive, but I constantly felt I was letting them down. I had to ask for my scripts really early, so I could read them over and over again — which put extra pressure on the writers, who were already under the gun every week, having to get 24 scripts ready in rapid succession. All this at the height of my fame and success, as I was playing the coolest guy in the world.”

When Winkler was diagnosed, “I was so f—ing angry,” he writes. “All the misery I’d gone through had been for nothing. All the yelling, all the humiliation, all the screaming arguments in my house as I was growing up — for nothing… It was genetic! It wasn’t a way I decided to be! And then I went from feeling this massive anger to fighting through it.”

Winkler has since written several best-selling books to educate others about dyslexia. “What I have found over the years talking to kids today about it is that our journeys are similar,” he said. “The feeling of inadequacy, of embarrassment, of, ‘Oh my gosh, am I going to have a future?'”

Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond is out Oct. 31.

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