DeFazio was quick-tempered and defensive

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Her family announced the death but did not disclose a specific cause.

Early in her career, Ms. Williams had supporting but notable screen roles in George Lucas’s nostalgic comedy-drama “American Graffiti” (1973) and Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoia thriller “The Conversation” (1974).

She was by far best known for “Laverne & Shirley,” the “Happy Days” spinoff that ran on ABC from 1976 to 1983 that in its prime was among the most popular shows on TV.

Ms. Williams played the strait-laced Shirley Feeney to Marshall’s more libertine Laverne DeFazio on the show about a pair of blue-collar roommates who toiled on the assembly line of a Milwaukee brewery in the 1950s and ’60s.

; Feeney was naive and trusting. The actors drew upon their telegram database own lives for plot inspiration.

“We’d make up a list at the start of each season of what talents we had,” Marshall told the Associated Press in 2002. “Cindy could touch her tongue to her nose, and we used it in the show. I did tap dance.”

The series was the rare network hit about working-class characters, with its self-empowering opening song: “Give us any chance, we’ll take it, read us any rule, we’ll break it.”

That opening would become as popular as the show itself. Ms. Williams’ and Marshall’s chant of “schlemiel, schlimazel” as they skipped together became a cultural phenomenon and oft-invoked piece of nostalgia.

Marshall, whose brother, Garry Marshall, co-created the series, died in 2018.

The show also starred Michael McKean and David Lander as Laverne and Shirley’s oddball hangers-on Lenny and Squiggy. Lander died in 2020.

As ratings dropped in the sixth season, the characters moved from Milwaukee to Burbank, Calif., trading their brewery jobs for work at a department store.