Henry Winkler Reveals the One “Happy Days ”Guest Star He Felt Let Fame Go to His Head
Henry Winkler Reveals the One “Happy Days ”Guest Star He Felt Let Fame Go to His Head
Virginia ChamleeSat, August 1, 2026 at 9:29 AM UTC
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Henry WinklerCredit: Araya Doheny/Getty; Silver Screen Collection/Getty -
Henry Winkler shared a story about a guest star on Happy Days who let fame go to his head
Winkler recalled the actor bragging about fan mail
Winkler added: “The truth of the matter is really on our set there was no stardom”
Henry Winkler is recalling a Happy Days guest star that didn’t exactly mesh with the other cast members.
Winkler, 80, rose to fame as Arthur Fonzarelli (nicknamed “Fonzie” or “The Fonz”) on the show from 1974 to 1984.
Speaking at a recent fan expo in Tennessee alongside co-stars Anson Williams and Don Most, Winkler said, “The truth of the matter is really on our set there was no stardom.”
He then offered a slight caveat.
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Tom Bosley, Denis Mandel on Happy DaysCredit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty
“One guy came on as a guest star, and then he was brought back a few times, and he would mention his fan mail, and I said, ‘You don’t want to talk to me about fan mail, I get 50,000 letters a week.’ ”
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“And I said, ‘We don’t talk about that on the set. We are all here as one.’ And he kept doing it, and he was an a--back,” Winkler said, adding that the guest star “played Eugene” on the show.
Winkler did not name names, though Parade notes that actor Denis Mandel played Eugene Belvin on seasons 8 and 9 of the show before stepping away from the acting industry.
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Most of the actors did mesh well, with Ron Howard — who played Richie on the show from 1974 to 1980— saying he and Winkler hit it off “immediately.”
“We clicked. We — Henry Winkler and I — clicked immediately, on a kind of professional level, but I also looked up to him,” Howard told PEOPLE at the WSJ Future of Everything event in May 2025 at The Glasshouse in New York City.
“Henry’s a few years older than I am. Yale educated, and he looked at acting in a way that was — it wasn’t Hollywood,” Howard shared at the time. “It was a little more intellectual. It was theater based, and that was new to me. But more than anything, we just got along beautifully and worked well together.”
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
