Henry Winkler Opens Up About The “Humiliating” And “Shameful” Experience Of Battling Dyslexia While Reading Lines For ‘Happy Days’: “I Was So F**king Angry”

Henry Winkler‘s Arthur Fonzarelli, more commonly known as “Fonzie” or “The Fonz,” became a pop culture icon on Happy Days thanks to his unlimited capacity for being cool. However, dyslexia prevented Winkler from keeping his calm, cool, and collected persona in check behind the scenes.

In an excerpt published by People from his upcoming memoir Being Henry: The Fonz… And Beyond, Winkler writes of his struggles with dyslexia, which plagued him throughout his acting career when it came to reading lines.

He explains that he “didn’t find out [he] was severely dyslexic until [he] was thirty-one,” and that “even in the midst of Happy Days, at the height of [his] fame and success, [he] felt embarrassed, inadequate.”

“Every Monday at ten o’clock, we would have a table reading of that week’s script, and at every reading I would lose my place, or stumble,” he writes in his new novel. “I would leave a word out, a line out. I was constantly failing to give the right cue line, which would then screw up the joke for the person doing the scene with me. Or I would be staring at a word, like ‘invincible,’ and have no idea on earth how to pronounce it or even sound it out.”

Claiming that he and his brain “were in different zip codes,” he describes the experience of his cast mates waiting and staring at him as “humiliating and shameful.” While he notes that “everybody in the cast was warm and supportive,” he “constantly felt [he] was letting them down.”

“I had to ask for my scripts really early, so I could read them over and over again- which put extra pressure on the writers, who were already under the gun every week, having to get twenty-four scripts ready in rapid succession,” he pens. “All this at the height of my fame and success, as I was playing the coolest guy in the world.”

He continues, “When I found out that I had something with a name, I was so fucking angry. All the misery I’d gone through had been for nothing. All the yelling, all the humiliation, all the screaming arguments in my house as I was growing up – for nothing… It was genetic!”

This proved to be a relieving experience for Winkler, who writes that he “went from feeling this massive anger to fighting through it.”

Winkler learned that he was dyslexic after his stepson was tested and diagnosed, per Entertainment Weekly. His other two children were also diagnosed with dyslexia like him, which he highlighted was “hereditary” to People.

He has since become an advocate for those with the learning disorder, telling TODAY.com in May that “how you learn has nothing to do with how great you are.”

“And how difficult it is for you to learn has nothing to do the with destiny you’re going to meet,” he added.

Happy Days is streaming on Paramount+, and Winkler’s memoir will be released on Tuesday, Oct. 31.