Henry Winkler has spent a lifetime turning difficult lessons into work that brings people together, but his most meaningful role may be the one he keeps learning at home.
“I listened to my children,” Winkler said in an interview with Graham Bensinger, describing the change he began to make after starting therapy later in life.
Winkler, now 80, became a household name as Arthur Fonzarelli, known as Fonzie, on HAPPY DAYS before finding a later-career resurgence as Gene Cousineau on BARRY, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Television Academy also lists Winkler as an actor, director, producer and author with a career spanning five decades.
But Winkler’s conversation with Bensinger quickly moved past the leather jacket and the awards to the inner work that helped him become more present for his wife, his children and his grandchildren. He said he began therapy at about 70, after years of smoothing over pain and moving forward without really confronting it.
“I just knew I needed a goal and I was going to find it,” Winkler said.
That goal gradually showed up in ordinary family conversations. Winkler said he learned to stop, reconsider his first response and give his children room to speak, even when the conversation took longer than he wanted.
“You can literally wait,” the actor explained.
He explained that listening does not always require inserting your own opinion.
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“You don’t have to be an active participant every time you listen,” he suggested.
That lesson carries a quiet kind of humility. A parent does not have to win every exchange or have the perfect answer ready; sometimes love looks like staying in the room long enough for another person to finish a thought.
Winkler also connected therapy to his work as an actor.
“It opened me up,” he said, explaining that the process helped him access emotional depth he had struggled to reach earlier in his career.
Britannica noted that Winkler won a Primetime Emmy for his performance in BARRY, a role that introduced him to a new generation of viewers.
His story with dyslexia adds another layer to that hard-won perspective. Winkler said he was not diagnosed until adulthood, after years of being judged for struggles he could not explain.
“I was told I was stupid. I was told I was lazy. I bought it,” Winkler said.
Yale’s Center for Dyslexia and Creativity reported that Winkler learned he had dyslexia at 31 and later drew on those experiences while writing the Hank Zipzer children’s books with Lin Oliver. Penguin Random House described Winkler as a children’s book author and advocate who wants children with dyslexia to know they are smart and capable of great things.
Those experiences also shaped the kind of father Winkler wanted to become.
“I’m going to be a different parent than my parents were,” he said, describing the promise he made as he built a family of his own.
Winkler told Bensinger he has been married to Stacey Weitzman for 48 years. The couple has three children and seven grandchildren, and he said marriage taught him to stop treating life as a negotiation between two separate people.
“I have learned what it was like to create a we instead of a me and you,” Winkler said. It is an unfinished lesson, not a polished slogan.
Winkler said he is still learning how to stay open, make room and let the people he loves be fully seen. The actor who once played the impossibly cool Fonz is not presenting himself as someone who has mastered family life; he is describing the grace of becoming more honest, more attentive and more willing to listen — one conversation at a time.
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