Even Henry Winkler is star-struck!
On Kelly Ripa’s SiriusXM podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa on Wednesday, October 9, Winkler, 78, recently shared “one of my favorite Hollywood stories”—the account of how he first met Robert De Niro. During the conversation, he revealed that De Niro, 81, astonishingly recalled everything they talked about when they met again decades later.
Winker narrated, recalling that he and Howard were on a break from rehearsals for Happy Days, the 1970s ABC comedy in which they both starred. “Leaning against the doorframe is Robert De Niro; he’s doing a scene from Godfather II.”
“I told Ron, we’ve got to go and say hello,” Winkler remarked. Though Winkler was already a successful actor by the early 1970s, De Niro’s career was only getting started—Winkler even said that De Niro’s 1973 film Mean Streets, directed by Martin Scorsese, was the first film he was ever invited to watch after starting out in Hollywood.
“Okay, so we go up, say hello, finish, and walk away, and I turned around and said, ‘Mr. De Niro, I just have to tell you, you use the word ‘f—‘ better than anybody on the planet,'” the actor recalled.
As Winkler stated, when he ran across De Niro again decades later at a premiere for the two-time Oscar winner’s 2015 film The Intern, he remembered their precise discussion from the 1970s.
“We go to the premiere party, [wife Stacey Weitzman] and I, and against the back wall, Robert De Niro is wearing one of those Irish caps.” Winkler remembers. I walk up to him. I turn and stand against the wall. I looked at him and said, “I have to ask you—as every fan has asked me—to take a selfie with you.” He responded, ‘Okay.’ I take my camera out. I’m taking a selfie. He replies, “40 years ago, you claimed I used the term ‘f—‘ better than anybody.”
” I dropped the camera,” Winkler explained of his response. “I said, ‘He remembers. Oh, God, I exist. This is truly remarkable. That’s my wonderful story.”