“You learn to negotiate with your learning challenge.  I improvised.  I never read anything the way that it was written in my entire life.”

“I could instantly memorize a lot of it and then what I didn’t know, I made up and threw caution to the wind and did it with conviction and sometimes I made them laugh and sometimes I got hired,” he said.

Although he eventually was cast as Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli in Happy Days, he admitted he struggled during table reads.

“When we did Happy Days, I embarrassed myself for 10 years reading around that table with the producers, the other actors, the director, all of the department heads. On Monday morning, we read the scripts. I stumbled over every word. I was completely embarrassed. Memorizing, if it’s written well, my brain is then able to suck it up like a vacuum cleaner.”

It wasn’t until his stepson began struggling in school and was tested for a learning disability that Winkler considered he too might have dyslexia.