In the mid-Seventies Cindy Williams and her friend Penny Marshall were kooky out-of-work actresses, who went on double dates, wrote comedy scripts together and were broke. By the late Seventies they were channelling the same personas in America’s top-rated TV show Laverne & Shirley.
Its success owed much to the rapport of the protagonists: single, working-class room-mates who work in a brewery bottling factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Williams described her character, Shirley Feeney, as “an optimistic, kind-hearted girl who would occasionally ‘flip out’ ”. Marshall’s character Laverne DeFazio was wisecracking, straight-talking and street tough. Both young women had an overriding preoccupation. “Laverne would be the one saying ‘I’d like to make out with him’, I’d be the one reining her in but at the