'I Just Wanted To Be Treated Fairly': Why Cindy Williams Made An Abrupt Exit From Laverne & Shirley

Cindy Williams first played the role of Shirley Feeney on an episode of "Happy Days." She was to be a date for Richie Cunningham, played by Ron Howard — one of those iconic '70s sitcom stars still working. Shirley's best friend and roommate was Laverne DeFazio, played by Penny Marshall. The two women got a spin-off show called "Laverne & Shirley," which was wildly popular, and the show ran for eight seasons.

However, despite the show's fandom, Williams was a star who didn't make the series finale. Her last appearance was on Episode 3 of Season 8, and in the same way that the character of Laverne seemed blindsided by Shirley leaving, viewers were also left in the dark as to what really happened. Williams, who died in 2023, spoke about why before her death. From her perspective, it was because she was pregnant, and she couldn't come to an agreement with the showrunners over her schedule and how it would align with her becoming a mother. "I wasn't asking for special treatment; I just wanted to be treated fairly," Williams said, according to Woman's World.

In an appearance on the "Today" show in 2015, Williams talked to Savannah Guthrie about her awkward exit from the show and how things just didn't pan out the way she would have hoped. "When it came time for me to sign my contract for that season, they had me working on my due date to have my baby," Williams explained. "And I said, 'You know, I can't sign this.' And it went back and forth and back and forth and it just never got worked out."

Cindy Williams thought there could have been a way for her to work while pregnant; many actresses have hid their pregnancies for a role. But it reportedly sounds like producers at the studio apparently deciding that they'd rather cut Shirley out of "Laverne & Shirley" entirely rather than accommodate Williams's requests to have her days on set made shorter and simpler, per Woman's World.

Once negotiations broke down, Shirley was written off the show, and Williams filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit for how she felt she was being forced out.  Williams had been making $75,000 per episode, plus $37,500 for reruns, per UPI Archives. Reporting at the time said that Williams had had a verbal agreement that her pregnancy could be a part of the show that the producers didn't follow through on. It seems especially awkward because Williams was suing Garry Marshall, creator and executive producer of the show. Garry is Penny Marshall's brother — the same Penny who was playing Laverne as all the drama went down.

For her part, when Marshall talked about the aftermath of Williams' leaving the show in a 2016 interview with the Archive of American Television, she had a different take. She thought more of the blame was with Williams' husband, Bill Hudson, and how he took control of things. Bill had previously been married to Goldie Hawn and is the father of Kate Hudson. "I wasn't aware he'd be such a pest [with negotiations]" Marshall said. "It was all this insanity. It wasn't Cindy. ... I missed her not being there."