H enry Winkler has long had a reputation as one of the nicest men in Hollywood. There is no situation that his presence cannot brighten up, something that was proved this week during a fire at Dublin’s 200-year-old Shelbourne Hotel. Although the fire was by no means catastrophic, it did involve the evacuation of all the hotel’s guests, some of whom were met by reporters as they left.
And one of them, you guessed it, was Winkler. “I called downstairs and the woman said in a very calm voice, ‘Yes! We’re all evacuating! You must evacuate right now!’,” he told RTÉ News. See? Charming.
‘Firemen are some of my favourite human beings’: evacuated hotel guest turns out to be Henry Winkler Read more However, it seems that nobody at RTÉ News knew that the lovely animated man they were speaking to was Winkler. Maybe they had never seen the comedy series Happy Days or Arrested Development or Barry, and were oblivious to the fact that he was visiting the city to promote his memoir. Either way, at no point during the interview did they reference the fact that they were talking to The Fonz.
Stranger still, this is by no means an isolated incident. Just last week, TikTokker Georgia Godworth made the news after she stopped a man on the street to discuss his sex life (“the person I’m married to and I found our own really genuine and authentic concept of what our contract to each other should be,” if you’re interested) without twigging that the man was the acclaimed.