Henry Winkler was 72 years old when he won his first Primetime Emmy Award. The actor, who became a household name in the 1970s for his role as Fonzie on Happy Days, didn’t score Emmy gold until 2018, for his supporting role as Gene Cousineau on Barry.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that his long-overdue award is displayed prominently in his home and not hidden away in storage.
“My Emmy,” Winkler, 79, told Woman’s World in a September 2025 interview. “I keep it polished. It’s on the dining room table, so when I open the front door, everybody can see it.”
In 2019, Winkler told The Television Academy that he didn’t want to store his coveted award any other way. “It’s on my dining room table,” he said. “You walk in the front door, there’s a hallway, and then there’s the dining room, and there it is. I don’t keep it in the bathroom. It is not a doorstop. It’s not in the garage somewhere.”
Winkler also joked during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable that when the mailman delivers his Lipitor, he “gets to see” the Emmy.
“I never thought, ‘Oh, I deserve it,’” he added. “I never thought, ‘Oh, it took so long.’ I’ll tell you what I was not prepared for. When you’re nominated, you think, ‘That’s great,’ and everybody says, ‘My gosh, just to be nominated,’ which lasts until your tush hits the seat. And then you want it. But people treat you differently when you’ve won.”
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Winkler’s Emmy win was one of the biggest feel-good moments of the 70th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards broadcast in 2018. After winning an acting Emmy for the first time—after seven nominations, including some from his Happy Days era—Winkler took the stage to deliver a poignant speech decades in the making.
“I wrote this 43 years ago,” Winkler joked of his speech. “[Hollywood attorney] Skip Brittenham said to me a long time ago, ‘If you sit at the table long enough, the chips will come your way.’ Tonight, I got to clear the table.”
