Hanks’ reprimand “There’s no crying in baseball,” from “A League of Their Own,” remains quoted on baseball diamonds everywhere. The piano dance scene in FAO Schwartz in “Big” became iconic. More than any other films, “A League of Their Own” and “Big” ensured Marshall’s stamp on the late ’80s, early ’90s. That, too, crossed $100 million, making $107.5 million domestically. Marshall reteamed with Hanks for “A League of Their Own,” the 1992 comedy about the women’s professional baseball league begun during World War II, starring Geena Davis, Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell. The film, which earned Hanks an Oscar nomination, grossed $151 million worldwide, or about $320 million accounting for inflation. Her 1988 hit comedy “Big,” starring Tom Hanks, was about a 12-year-old boy who wakes up in the body of a 30-year-old New York City man. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” did fair business, but Marshall’s next film made her the first woman to direct a film that grossed more than $100 million. When Whoopi Goldberg clashed with director Howard Zieff, she brought in Marshall to direct “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the 1986 comedy starring Goldberg. Those episodes helped launch Marshall as a filmmaker. Marshall directed several episodes of “Laverne & Shirley,” which her older brother, the late filmmaker-producer Garry Marshall, created.

“Almost everyone had a theory about why ‘Laverne & Shirley’ took off,” Marshall wrote in her 2012 memoir “My Mother Was Nuts.” “I thought it was simply because Laverne and Shirley were poor and there were no poor people on TV, but there were plenty of them sitting at home and watching TV.” A spinoff of “Happy Days,” the series was the rare network hit about working-class characters, and its self-empowering opening song (“Give her any chance, she’ll take it/Give her any rule, she’ll break it”) foreshadowed Marshall’s own path as a pioneering female filmmaker in Hollywood. In “Laverne & Shirley,” among television’s biggest hits for much of its eight-season run between 1976-1983, the nasal-voiced, Bronx-born Marshall starred as Laverne DeFazio alongside Cindy Williams as a pair of blue-collar roommates toiling on the assembly line of a Milwaukee brewery.

“Our family is heartbroken,” the Marshall family said in a statement. Michelle Bega, a spokeswoman for the Marshall family, said Tuesday that Marshall died in her Los Angeles home on Monday night because of complications from diabetes. NEW YORK – Penny Marshall, the trailblazing director of smash-hit big-screen comedies such as “Big” and “A League of Their Own” who first indelibly starred in the top-rated sitcom “Laverne & Shirley,” has died.

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