Henry Winkler

The Fonz only had about six lines in the pilot. ABC wouldn't let him wear the leather jacket full-time, fearing the hoodlum optics, until a compromise let him keep it around his motorcycle. Garry Marshall wanted someone tall and blond. By the mid-70s, the character had outgrown the show so completely that ABC briefly considered renaming it Fonzie's Happy Days. He turned down Grease to avoid locking himself deeper into the greaser type, which looked smart at the time and felt catastrophic for the next decade.

Eight years after Happy Days ended, he couldn't get hired. He has said the typecasting was debilitating. The comeback came in pieces: Arrested Development put him back in front of audiences, and Barry finished the job. He won his first Emmy in 2018, after 45 years in the industry and six prior nominations. The acceptance speech? He has said he wrote it 43 years earlier. At 80, he's the guy who outlasted the box everyone tried to put him in.

For his entire career, he improvised. Every line, every scene. He's said he never read a script the way it was written because he couldn't. His dyslexia wasn't diagnosed until he was 31, when his stepson struggled with a school assignment and Winkler recognized himself in the behavior. He co-wrote the Hank Zipzer series afterward, 17 books about a dyslexic kid that sold over 3 million copies, because the kid he'd been didn't have anything like that to read.