Happy Days' Henry Winkler on Bruce Springsteen, Barry and bringing his show The Fonz and Beyond to Grand Opera House York

“It’s the truth,” says Henry Winkler, the man who shot to fame playing the character.

The subject comes up because the evening before our video call, Winkler posted a selfie with The Boss, having seen his show at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles.

Winkler’s obvious delight about the concert also goes some way in showing what an enthusiastic soul he is.

“Bruce Springsteen puts on a show. He started at 7.40, he finished at 11 and you don't even finish applauding and yelling for the song you just heard, he's going ‘one, two, three four!’ and they're into a whole other… Oh my God! And then Tom Morello, from Rage Against The Machine, came out and played the guitar… like, I don’t know, like he was dropped from heaven.”

At home in LA – sensibly dressed in a shirt and jumper, Emmy and autobiography proudly propped up behind him as he stops for kisses with his big, fluffy dog, Maisie – he couldn't look less like the Fonz.

But we’ve come to expect the unexpected from the man who jumped the shark - cartoon cool in Happy Days, when really he was “a nervous wreck”; born and raised in Manhattan, but improbably well-acquainted with Yorkshire towns like Dewsbury.

And while he’s accustomed to seeing the Los Angeles Lakers play basketball, Winkler is also something of a Leeds United follower, thanks to his daughter-in-law - his son Max, a director, is married to actress Jessica Barden, who was raised in Wetherby.

However, it’s to York he comes next month, on his speaking tour, Henry Winkler: The Fonz and Beyond, during which he will share his experience of life as a TV star.

“I love this aspect of my life,” he says. “I'm on stage, there are an audience, we laugh together, I tell them my story. And my instinct is that we are all the same. And if I tell them the truth, and we laugh about it, somebody is going to say: ‘I identify completely’.”

He also loves to get members of the audience involved afterwards with a Q&A.

The interview has barely got under way, though, when it’s his dogs who are asking questions. He briefly halts the conversation and calls for them to come in. “Wow, you just can’t walk around yelling like that” he tells the five-year-old goldendoodle, Maisie, who saunters into the room and settles down for snuggles.

It’s rare to interview famous people relaxed at home, in their own element. However, there are signs of stardom: the aforementioned autobiography, Being Henry, and, of course, the golden Primetime Emmy shining in the Californian sun behind him.

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He won in 2018 for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series, Barry. Bill Hader’s critically-acclaimed HBO show, which ran for four series, was about the title character’s messy attempts to leave behind his job as a hitman in order to pursue acting and a normal life.

Winkler played the narcissistic and caddish but charming star acting teacher, Gene Cousineau.

“Honest to God, without hyperbole, you are in for a treat,” says Winkler to those who have not seen the show.

“It is beautifully crafted, beautifully thought out. Crazy as a loon. Complicated. Funny. Dark. One episode your jaw drops to the ground, in the next episode, you are cheering the same guy.”

Winkler was born shortly after the end of the Second World War on October 30, 1945, in New York City – his German Jewish parents, Harry and Ilse, had fled Berlin in 1939.

In his late 20s, Winkler achieved fame as Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli on the American series Happy Days, which ran from 1974 to 1984. In his book, he writes about the Emmy for Barry being a full circle moment. He had won two daytime awards before – one for voicing Norville in Clifford’s Puppy Days in 2005, and 20 years prior, his first for directing an after-school special. Primetime, though, was big for him because it’s where he started – he was nominated three times for Happy Days but never won.

“When you have the kind of success I had right out of the gate, it’s very hard to think that it might never come again,” wrote Winkler. “And so this Emmy was a validation, not only of the kind of work I could do, but of the kind of work I could do at seventy-two.”

Now, aged 78, he says: “It means something and it means nothing. What I love is that I’m part of the lore of any winners. Practically, I love that it will say ‘Emmy Award winner Henry Winkler is in this project’ instead of ‘nominee’. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the announcer go: “This is Henry Winkler's 1000th nomination, his first win. It was fun. I said to my children in the speech: ‘Kids, you can go to sleep now, daddy won!’ Of course, they were 40, 43 and 53.”

He’s not exactly been without interesting work, however, and has been able to act alongside great talent throughout his career.

Modern audiences will also know him from a number of acclaimed television comedies besides Barry.

“I am very lucky. Starting with Garry Marshall, I have worked with human beings who are at the top of their game. Mitch Hurwitz, for Arrested Development. The people who did Parks and Recreation. Adam Sandler, I did five films for Adam. You know, he doesn't dress well, but he's just brilliant. I'm not kidding.”

Then there’s the auteur director Wes Anderson, who cast Winkler in a small role as Uncle Joe in The French Dispatch alongside names such as Adrien Brody and Benicio del Toro.

Not to mention his own work with Hank Zipzer: The World's Greatest Underachiever. These books by Winkler and writer Lin Oliver tell the story of a dyslexic child – inspired by the actor, who was diagnosed himself at 31 – and were later turned into television series in the UK.

“I could not sell Hank Zipzer here in America on television and it was the BBC (who took it). We did three years and a television movie with the great Felicity Montagu, who played Miss Adolf the way I dreamt her to be.”

Filming for that Christmas Catastrophe special took place at the former Birkdale School school in Dewsbury, while Birstall restaurant Luigi’s treated Winkler and his wife Stacey “like family,” he says.

I last spoke to Winkler in 2016 as he was promoting that special, when he was similarly full of praise then not only for Luigi’s but for Tingley Balti House.

So when it’s time to wrap up the interview, I tell him that we’ll speak again in another eight years.

“You bet! That’s a date!”

Henry Winkler: The Fonz and Beyond is at Grand Opera House York on Sunday, June 23. Tickets: fane.co.uk/henry-winkler