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Gire on Penny Marshall: Hollywood's most unassuming, barrier-bashing director

I asked budding filmmaker Penny Marshall back in the 1980s what she liked best about directing a movie.

"Ooooohh, I'm trying to figure out what I like about it," she replied in a voice that could strip wallpaper.

"I whine soooo much. I did sort of like the preproduction part of the movie. I liked riding around in the bus, stopping at White Castle."

As you might guess, Penny Marshall comported herself as the most unassuming filmmaker in Hollywood.

She died Monday at age 75 at her Los Angeles home of complications from diabetes. She had been treated for lung cancer discovered in 2009 and suffered from a brain tumor.

But when I interviewed Marshall in 1988 while she was promoting her second directorial effort, "Big" starring Tom Hanks, neither one of us could possibly know she would become one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers and a smasher of gender barriers.

"Big" became the first woman-directed movie to cross the magical $100 million mark.

I asked Marshall to describe her directing style on "Big."

"Well," she replied. "I whine a great deal. I'm consistent in a very passive manner."

Originally, Harrison Ford had been slated to star in "Big" with Steven Spielberg as the director. Spielberg's silent shadow haunted her on the set.

"I don't know how to do special effects," Marshall confessed. "I'm sure that in his version, it (Hanks' transformation into a little boy) would have been more magical or at least flashier. He's a master filmmaker.

"Me? I just shoot here and there. I'm not a film student. I just do the best I can. That's all I know how to do, go on my instincts. That's what makes sense to me."

Those instincts would turn out to be the nucleus of her directing style.

That was clear when she directed her greatest cinematic achievement, "A League of Their Own," a touching, yet comic, look at female baseball teams filling in the sports gaps during World War II when most of America's young men had gone to serve their country.

"League," shot in Chicago and its suburbs, remains one of the strongest sisterhood-themed movies ever produced and boasted Madonna, Geena Davis and Rosie O'Donnell (and Hanks) in its cast.

Marshall also earned critical and modest popular success with 1990's "Awakenings," a medical drama starring Robert De Niro as a man emerging from an encephalitic trance. Robin Williams played his neurologist. De Niro snagged an Oscar nomination.

After a long, successful stint as a sitcom star in her brother Garry Marshall's TV shows "Laverne and Shirley," "The Odd Couple" and "Happy Days" (the show that introduced her Milwaukee brewery worker Laverne DeFazio), Marshall began her movie directorial career with a modest, unremarkable 1986 debut, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" starring Whoopi Goldberg.

"A lot of people still call me Laverne," Marshall said, "and Shirley. Sometimes both. I've gotten a little better about the residue from my TV show."

Marshall sat in a chair, her shoulders hunched over, a smoldering cigarette drooping from one hand.

She appeared to be totally comfortable, like a matriarch tucked away in the corner of a room next to the fireplace.

Yep. The most unassuming breakthrough, barrier-bashing filmmaker in the business.

Actress and director Penny Marshall dies at age 75

Penny Marshall arrives at the premiere of "New Year's Eve" in Los Angeles. Associated Press/2011
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