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Behind Winkler’s effortless performance was a personal challenge that viewers could not see. Winkler has spoken extensively about growing up with severe difficulties in school and later learning that he had dyslexia. Reading scripts and audition material could therefore be much more difficult for him than audiences might have imagined. He developed strategies that included quickly memorizing what he could and improvising when reading became difficult. The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity has documented Winkler’s description of adapting to those challenges throughout his early acting career. His eventual success as Fonzie is particularly striking because the profession he chose required him to work constantly with written scripts, the very material that had caused him so much frustration.
Winkler’s later openness about dyslexia also added another dimension to his public career. For years, many viewers saw him primarily as the actor who played one of television’s most confident characters. In reality, he had spent much of his childhood being made to feel that his academic struggles reflected a lack of intelligence. He eventually demonstrated the opposite through acting, producing, directing and writing. His experiences also contributed to his later work encouraging children who face learning challenges. The contrast between Fonzie’s apparently effortless cool and Winkler’s private struggle is one of the more meaningful stories behind Happy Days. It illustrates how little an audience may know about the difficulties a performer is managing behind the scenes.