For millions of Americans, Henry Winkler will always be The Fonz — confident, cool and seemingly untouchable.

But the boy behind that famous character felt very different.

Growing up, Winkler struggled terribly in school. He didn’t know he had dyslexia, and the adults around him often interpreted his difficulties as laziness or a lack of intelligence.

Even his parents, who had escaped Nazi Germany and built a new life in America, struggled to understand what their son was going through.

Winkler has recalled being punished over his schoolwork and carrying the feeling that he simply wasn’t good enough.

He wouldn’t discover the real reason until adulthood: he was dyslexic.

The diagnosis finally gave a name to something that had followed him since childhood — but it also brought anger over all the years he’d spent believing something was wrong with him.

Behind one of television’s most confident characters was an actor quietly carrying those wounds.

Now 80, Winkler speaks openly about that painful chapter, hoping children struggling today hear the message he needed all those years ago:

Difficulty in school doesn’t determine how brilliant you can become.