Henry Winkler Struggled with Lines as the Fonz, Felt 'So F---ing' Angry After Dyslexia Diagnosis (Exclusive)

In an exclusive excerpt from his new memoir, 'Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond', the 'Happy Days' star reveals years of secret pain

Henry Winkler may be known as one of the most genial actors in Hollywood, but during the height of his Happy Days fame, he harbored secret pain few knew about.

“I spent most of my adult life being frightened, on the outside looking like I had it together and mostly being anxious,” Winkler, 77, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, out Friday.

Born in New York to German Jewish parents who escaped the Nazis in 1939, Winkler calls his upbringing severe. In school, he struggled with reading and comprehension. “I was a terrible student,” he writes in his new memoir Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond.

Feelings of shame were exacerbated by his parents’ cold evaluation; in German, they would refer to him as dummer hund. Translation: dumb dog.

Related: Henry Winkler's 'Happy Days' Fame Stunned His Wife When 'the Entire Theater Came Over' on First Movie Date (Exclusive)

Winkler turned to humor to mask his struggles, eventually using his improv gifts to leapfrog from the Yale School of Drama to Hollywood, where a walk-on part on The Mary Tyler Moore Show led to a history-making audition for Happy Days.

At the height of his Fonzie fame, Winkler married his wife Stacey, whose young son Jed would begin displaying cognitive issues at school. Eventually the couple took Jed to an occupational therapist who diagnosed him with dyslexia. A light went on for Winkler.

“In third grade he had to write a report and couldn't do it,” Winkler tells PEOPLE. “I said to him everything that was said to me: ‘Go back to your room. You're being lazy. Live up to your potential. You're so verbal.’ I then had him tested and we read everything they said. I went, 'Oh my God, Stacey, this is me. I have something with a name.'"

Winkler’s other two children with Stacey, Max, 40, and Zoe, 43, would eventually be diagnosed with the learning disorder, too. “It’s hereditary,” says Winkler, who went on to launch secondary careers as a Hollywood producer (he’s produced the mid-1980’s hit MacGyver) and a prolific children’s book author (his latest book, Detective Duck: The Case of the Strange Splash, is out now).

Now, he’s finally written his life story. “My son Max said to me over the years, ‘Dad, you got to write a memoir. You've got so many stories.’ I said, ‘I'm dyslexic. I'm not writing a memoir.’ I dismissed it out of hand. There are so many things that I have done now that I have dismissed out of hand and boom, they became a really important part of my life,” says the star.

Related: Henry Winkler Reveals the Cover of His New Memoir 'Being Henry'

In an exclusive excerpt from his new memoir, Winkler reveals the secrets he kept while starring as the famously confident Fonz on Happy Days.

I didn't find out I was severely dyslexic until I was thirty-one. For all the years before that, I was the kid who couldn't read, couldn't spell, couldn't even begin to do algebra or geometry or even basic arithmetic. If I bought a slice of pizza with paper money, I had no idea how much change I was supposed to get - nor could I add up the coins in my hand. Even in the midst of Happy Days, at the height of my fame and success, I felt embarrassed, inadequate. Every Monday at ten 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. 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 twenty-four 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 I found out that I had something with a name, I was so f---g angry. 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.

An excerpt from the book Being Henry © 2023 by HenryWinkler, published by Celadon Books on October 31, 2023.

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Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond hits bookshelves on Oct. 31.

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