Henry Winkler is looking back on his Hollywood friendships—and the one that changed his life forever. In a retrospective for Entertainment Tonight, Winkler, 81, admitted he can’t explain the instant connection he had with Ron Howard, his co-star on Happy Days in the 1970s.
‘I don’t know,” Winkler said. “It is like from the heavens. There is like a thread that is unknown, unseen, unspoken between us…. I love him. I love him.”
Winkler, who played Fonzie on Happy Days opposite Howard’s Richie Cunningham, shared that his close friend and co-star confided to him early on about wanting to be a movie director.
“Ron talked to me from the very beginning of Happy Days,” Winkler recalled. “He said, ‘What do you think? I want to be a director. I said, ‘Ron’…now he’s 18 and I’m 27. I said, ‘You are the wisest, most centered person I’ve ever met. If you wanted to be a brain surgeon, I would be your first patient, whether I needed it or not.’”
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Winkler also revealed that Howard once asked him to raise his children if anything ever happened to him and his wife Cheryl.
“Before they left, before he and Cheryl left Hollywood, he said, ‘Would you, if, God forbid anything happens, take care of the children? You can bar mitzvah for them if you want,’” Winkler recalled. “And we said, ‘Yes.’”
“His children are like our godchildren,” Winkler continued. “Bryce Dallas. I take her to lunch. She said, ‘There’s this boy. Oh my God, I like him so much. How do I get him to pay attention?’ I said, ‘By breathing. You’re beautiful. You’re like, you don’t need to do anything, anything. Just be.’ They are married. They have two beautiful children.”
More than five decades after they first met, Winkler said his scenes with Howard on Happy Days were magic.
“We were touched by the universe,” the actor said during an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show earlier this year. “There was a string between us. I didn’t have to tell him what I was going to do. He didn’t tell me what he was going to do. We just were in the same space at the same moment. It’s rare.”
Related: Henry Winkler Reveals the One Rule He Always Followed When Playing the Fonz
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