Henry Winkler says it took years to forgive parents after abusive childhood, but he can’t forget 1 thing

Ryan ColemanThu, September 10, 2026 at 3:40 AM UTC

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Henry Winkler in Los Angeles in 2024Credit: Amy Sussman/GettyKey Points -

Henry Winkler is looking back on a childhood he calls abusive.

The Happy Days star says his parents viewed him as a “failure” and called him a “stupid dog” due to his undiagnosed dyslexia.

Though he says he has “over the while forgiven” them, there’s still one way they treated him in his childhood that he finds “unforgivable.”

Henry Winkler looking back at his troubled childhood.

The Happy Days star has written extensively about the adversity he faced during the years he struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia, even publishing the Frank Zipper children’s book series about a plucky youngster dealing with the neurodevelopmental condition.

Winkler plumbed the depths of his childhood in a segment of the In Depth with Grant Bensinger podcast posted Wednesday, considering whether he can well and truly forgive his parents after all these years.

“I’d never heard of [dyslexia] before. I just I was told I was stupid. I was told I was lazy. I bought it,” Winkler explained. But he still wonders, “How can a teacher or a parent see their child is struggling and not go, ‘You know what? Let’s take a breath here. Something is wrong. I don’t know necessarily what it is, but come on.’” But I was blamed for being the way I was on purpose.”

Henry Winkler as Arthur Fonzarelli on ‘Happy Days’Credit: Everett

When asked how his parents helped him through these challenges at school, Winkler laughed ruefully: “I embarrassed my parents. My parents could speak several languages. Dad could speak 11, and it was great. I mean, I really do admire [them]. They escaped Nazi Germany. They came to another country. They got to be able to stay here and become citizens... I appreciate all of that. I mean appreciate in the truest sense of the word. But as human beings, I was a failure. They let me know it.”

Bensinger asked the 80-year-old if his father’s verbal abuse ever crossed the line into physical abuse.

“Yes,” Winkler recalled. “I said something to him I thought was a was a joke. We were waiting for the elevator in the hallway of the building, and then right behind the elevator were stairs that you went up, and I ran up the stairs and he chased me, and caught me.”

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Winkler detailed other instances of his father’s ceaseless disapproval, before Bensinger asked if all these years later, he’s managed to forgive them.

“I think I have over the while forgiven, really,” he said.

Winkler said it was his goal to “be a different parent than my parents were” to his three children with wife Stacey Weitzman. With that perspective in mind, Winkler noted, “When you see your child and your child is having a problem, you don’t call them [a] stupid dog. You go, ‘Woah, wait a minute. There’s a problem here. I don’t know what it is, but let’s see.’ At least make you feel better so that you’re not floundering all the time, and feeling less than, and feeling like a failure — that is still to me unforgivable.”

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Winkler was finally diagnosed with dyslexia at age 31. According to the actor, the condition even plagued him on the set of Happy Days, which broke him out as a star.

“Even in the midst of Happy Days, at the height of my fame and success, I felt embarrassed, inadequate,” he wrote in his 2023 memoir, Being Henry: The Fonz... and Beyond. “My brain and I were in different zip codes” during table reads that Winkler struggled through. “Meanwhile, the other actors would be waiting, staring at me: It was humiliating and shameful. Everybody in the cast was warm and supportive, but I constantly felt I was letting them down.”

You can watch the full clip from Winkler’s upcoming interview on the In Depth podcast above.

on Entertainment Weekly

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