Penny Marshall Looks Back On Life — And The Movies — In Memoir 'My Mother Was Nuts'

In her new memoir My Mother Was Nuts, actress-comedienne-filmmaker Penny Marshall writes of her remarkable life: Growing up the youngest of three in The Bronx, she had a daughter followed brother Garry into showbiz, got famous as one-half of Laverne & Shirley, got married twice, got divorced twice, opened her home to friends like John Belushi, Carrie Fisher, Steven Spielberg, and Robert De Niro, and became the first female director to break the $100 million mark with 1988's Big, also notching films like Awakenings, A League Of Their Own, Renaissance Man, and The Preacher's Wife along the way.

Ringing Movieline to discuss her baldly honest, often hilarious memoir — which also reveals darker times, recreational drug use, an abortion, an on-set miscarriage — Marshall explained why she set out to write her life story to begin with: "You want to set the record straight on certain things, because there are so many rumors."
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My Mother Was Nuts Book Excerpt: How Robert De Niro, Not Tom Hanks, Almost Starred In Penny Marshall's Big

Actress and funny lady Penny Marshall made her name in television (Laverne & Shirley) before making an unexpected leap into directing with 1986's Jumpin' Jack Flash. But it was her sophomore feature, a fantasy about a boy transformed into a 30-year-old by a wish, that launched a career behind the camera — and made her the first woman director to gross $100 million. But as Marshall tells it in her wry, vivid memoir My Mother Was Nuts, everyone in Hollywood had passed on Big, Tom Hanks included — until, that is, an unlikely actor threw his hat into the ring: Robert De Niro.
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