How ‘Happy Days’ Star Found Love Again With ‘Dallas’ Star

Happy Days star Linda Purl, 69, has unexpectedly found love again with 76-year-old Dallas star Patrick Duffy, and in a new interview, she admits they are just as surprised as anybody.

Duffy and Purl were “acquaintances for 45 years,” she says during an appearance on The Jason Show to plug her current one-woman cabaret show.

They had “passed in the halls” doing various TV projects over the years, and then they ran into each other at random just before the pandemic broke out in 2020.

Duffy had done a play with The Waltons star Richard Thomas, and he’d lost touch with him. Purl was living near Thomas in New York at the time, and Duffy gave her his number to pass along, “I think innocently,” she says.

That turned into a text chain between the three of them, and then group Zooms once COVID had hit and everyone was trapped.

Thomas finally felt out of the chain, leaving Duffy and Purl to Zoom “for two or three hours” each night “for a couple of months.”

Finally, “At some point, it was like, ‘Oh, this might be something more than a swell friendship,'” she says. “And he jumped in his Prius, and he drove from his house in Oregon to mine in Colorado. And that was that,” she says.

Purl played Richie Cunningham’s girlfriend, Gloria, on Happy Days in a guest appearance in 1974, then returned to the show from 1982-1983 in the featured role of Fonzie’s girlfriend, Ashley Pfister. She’s been married four times.

Duffy is best known for the role of Bobby Ewing on Dallas. The actor’s wife of more than forty years, ballet dancer Carlyn Rosser, died in 2017 after battling cancer.

Duffy has said he never expected to find love again, and Purl says it came out of the blue for her, too.

“I mean, go figure,” she adds. “It couldn’t have happened outside of COVID. We never would have found that time to get to know each other … Believe me, there’s no one surprised more than the two of us that we are where we are.”