Henry Winkler has long been an idol for TV fans due to his long-running role as Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli on Happy Days in the 1970s and 1980s. But the man who played the Fonz is a bit of a fan boy himself.
During an August 2026 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Winkler, 80, spoke about his music idols, some of whom he has been lucky enough to meet.
“I love Brandy Carlile,” Winkler told guest host Jelly Roll. “I have [seen her in concert] twice. And, you know, I can’t leave the venue without giving her a hug. So I wait like a nine-year-old girl. And then see her friend was Joni Mitchell that night. So I’m hugging Brandi, and I see Joni Mitchell, and I said, ‘Excuse me.’ I went in, and I said, ‘Hello, my name is Henry Winkler.’ She said, ‘I know who you are.’”
Winkler noted that he then introduced the music legend to his wife, Stacey Weitzman.
“Then I said, ‘Oh, this is my wife Stacey,’” Winkler shared. “And she went, ‘Oh, so you’re the one who married the Fonz!’”
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Winkler once admitted he gets nervous when he meets celebrities he looks up to.
“I have a hard time with musicians,” the actor told NME in 2024. “I get tongue-tied. They’re my heroes. …I went backstage and met Brandi one time – and then I got to meet her friend, the majestic queen that is Joni Mitchell, who was in a room next to her.”
“I met John Lennon,” he added. “He brought his son Julian to the set of Happy Days. It’s one of the most important pictures I have in my house… I tried to have a conversation with John and he was very shy. It was really hard to pry a sentence out of him until I mentioned the song ‘Mother’, which was a primal scream on his first solo album [1970’s ‘John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’]. Suddenly he opened like a garden. I think of it as one of the great memories of my life.”
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Winkler’s love for music goes back well before he met Lennon on the Happy Days set in the mid-1970s. On Jimmy Kimmel Live, he recalled the very first concert he went to back in the late 1960s when he was in college.
“I went to the [Yale] drama school in New Haven, and I went to see Janis Joplin in the rain,” the Happy Days star shared.
Related: ‘Happy Days’ Fictional Band Was Actually a Real-Life Rock Group Fans Remember 50 Years Later
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