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Henry Winkler, 80, on Forgiving His Parents After a Painful Childhood: ‘I Was a Failure’
The ‘Happy Days’ actor said a dyslexia diagnosis at 31 changed how he understood years of criticism at home
Henry Winkler attends AARP’s 2026 Annual Movies for Grownups Awards on Jan. 10, 2026. He started therapy later in life and said it has helped him become a better listener.
Michael Kovac/Getty Images for AARP
Key takeaways
- Henry Winkler said he admires his parents for escaping Nazi Germany but is clear about the pain he experienced growing up.
- Winkler was 31 when he learned he had dyslexia after years of being called lazy and unintelligent.
- He said his childhood influenced how he raised his own children and helped lead him to therapy around age 70.
Henry Winkler, 80, still wrestles with how to hold contrasting feelings about his parents: gratitude for the life they built after escaping Nazi Germany and anger over the way they treated him as a child.
“I really do admire [them],” Winkler told journalist Graham Bensinger on a recent episode of the In Depth With Graham Bensinger podcast. “They escaped Nazi Germany. They came to another country.” But, he added, “As human beings, I was a failure. They let me know it.”
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Much of that judgment centered on school. Winkler was 31 when he finally learned why reading had always been so difficult: He had dyslexia. Until then, teachers and his parents had treated those struggles as evidence of a lack of intelligence or effort.
“I was told I was stupid. I was told I was lazy. I bought it,” he said.
In an interview with AARP in 2023, Winkler said he was “so verbal” as a child, but his parents “embraced the conclusions of my teachers, which was ‘You’re not living up to your potential,’ which eventually became ‘You are lazy and stupid.’ ”
School gave Winkler plenty of ways to hide what he could not do—he became a class clown to cover his difficulties. He dreaded reading aloud and doodled instead of taking notes. He recalled sprinkling water on his copy of A Tale of Two Cities and letting it dry and crinkle so it would look like he’d read the book.
“I was blamed for being the way I was on purpose,” he said.
Dyslexia is common and has nothing to do with intelligence. According to the American Brain Foundation, dyslexia is a brain-based learning disorder that affects reading and the processing of written language and may affect up to 20 percent of the population. It is often identified when children begin learning to read, but a diagnosis can come at any age.
People with dyslexia may read slowly, misread or transpose letters, need to reread material to understand it and feel uncomfortable reading aloud. In teens and adults, it can also show up as difficulty with spelling, memorization and learning a foreign language. According to the International Dyslexia Association, dyslexia runs in families.
For Winkler, the diagnosis changed the way he understood years of criticism at home. His parents were highly accomplished linguistically, he told Bensinger; his father spoke 11 languages. Winkler felt like he didn’t measure up.
“I embarrassed my parents,” he said.
They responded by grounding him: “I had to sit at my desk as if I was going to get it.”
Learning that dyslexia can run in families added another layer to those memories.
“So the very people who are putting me down gave it to me,” he said in the podcast.
Winkler said honest conversations with his parents were difficult. He remembered trying to talk to his father when he was about 23.
“Dad, I just want you to know it’s really difficult to have a conversation with you,” Winkler recalled saying.
His father, he said, responded by reminding him of everything he had done for his son and everything Winkler owed him. The conversation went no further.
On the podcast, Winkler shared that he’d fantasized: “I’m going to open up the apartment door. And my parents had moved and left no forwarding address.”
Winkler’s relationship with his parents also shaped the kind of father he wanted to become. He told Bensinger that as a boy, he would lie awake imagining both becoming an actor and someday parenting differently.
As an adult, Winkler prioritized listening to his three children: stepson Jed Weitzman, daughter Zoe Winkler and son Max Winkler. When one of them wanted to talk, Winkler said, he tried to stop and listen. If he was too upset to hear them clearly, he would say so and ask them to come back in 10 minutes rather than force the conversation.
By the time Winkler became a parent, he was already famous as Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli on Happy Days, the role that made him a household name in the 1970s. He later appeared in Arrested Development and won a Primetime Emmy in 2018 for playing acting teacher Gene Cousineau (opposite Bill Hader’s tortured hit man, Barry Berkman) on HBO’s Barry. He also drew on his school experiences as coauthor of the Hank Zipzer children’s books about a bright boy with dyslexia.
But some of what Winkler carried from childhood remained with him for decades. He told Bensinger he began therapy around age 70 after years of finding ways to rationalize or push difficult feelings aside.
“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he said.
In his 2023 interview with AARP, Winkler described the emotional work in more physical terms.
“I had covered that up with a Chernobyl-like layer of cement and let it sit,” he said. “I’ve spent years digging in, jackhammering that cement into small pieces.”
Therapy also changed the way he listens, Winkler told Bensinger. Instead of listening while waiting for an opening to contribute his opinion, he said he has learned that “you can listen and just listen.”
For people considering therapy later in life, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) offers a practical, skills-based, action-oriented approach to talk therapy. In a 2026 AARP story, psychologist Kevin Chapman explained that much of the work happens between sessions, when patients practice those skills in daily life.
Chapman says starting therapy later does not mean progress has to take years. He pointed to a 75-year-old patient with agoraphobia (the fear of leaving home) who, after nine sessions, was able to leave her neighborhood, buy an RV and move west to be near her son.
“Most people assume decades of anxiety mean years of treatment,” Chapman told AARP. “The research shows the opposite.”
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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