Ron Howard and the Trouble With Being Hollywood’s Nicest Director

Ron Howard

Photo: Jay Dixit / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 1, 1954 Duncan, Oklahoma, United States
Occupation	Film director
Known for	A Beautiful Mind, Rush, Apollo 13
Awards	Academy Award · Academy Award (shared) · Directors Guild of America · 2 Emmy · Grammy · National Medal of Arts

The funniest thing anyone has done with Ron Howard lately is refuse to tell him the truth. In “The Note”, an episode of Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ comedy The Studio, a studio’s top executives agonise over how to give the famously nice director a piece of criticism about his new film, and Howard plays a version of himself with a temper nobody has ever associated with him. The joke works because no one watching needs it explained. More than six decades after he first stood in front of a camera, that cameo earned him the first acting Emmy nomination of his life.

The reputation was built before he was old enough to choose it. Howard was born in Duncan, Oklahoma, the elder son of Rance Howard, an actor and writer who had changed his surname from Beckenholdt, and the actress Jean Speegle. The family settled in Burbank, and as a small boy Ronny Howard, as the credits called him, became Opie Taylor, the son of Andy Griffith’s small-town sheriff in The Andy Griffith Show. He stayed for all eight seasons, took lessons on the Desilu lot and, between episodes, played Winthrop, the lisping boy in The Music Man. His younger brother Clint became an actor too, and decades later the two wrote a joint memoir, The Boys, about how their parents raised two child actors in Hollywood.

The second act came through George Lucas. Born on March 1, 1954, Howard was still a teenager when he played Steve Bolander in American Graffiti, in 1973, anchoring a cast that included Richard Dreyfuss, Cindy Williams and a young Harrison Ford, and the film’s success fed straight into Happy Days, where from 1974 he played Richie Cunningham, the buttoned-down counterweight to Henry Winkler’s Fonz. Acting was never the whole ambition. Howard struck a bargain with Roger Corman: he would star in Eat My Dust! if Corman let him direct, and the result was Grand Theft Auto in 1977, co-written with his father. In 1980 he left Happy Days to direct full time.

The early studio run was a string of commercial bets that paid. Night Shift put Michael Keaton on screen opposite Winkler. Splash gave Tom Hanks a mermaid, played by Daryl Hannah, and a hit. Cocoon won Don Ameche an Oscar, and Parenthood, with an ensemble led by Steve Martin, passed $100 million at the North American box office. With the producer Brian Grazer he built Imagine Entertainment, the company that would later make Arrested Development, the sitcom Howard narrated off camera for its whole run and which won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series after its first season.

The prestige years followed. Apollo 13, with Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, turned a mission whose ending everyone knew into a procedural thriller, collected nine Oscar nominations and won Howard the Directors Guild award. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with Jim Carrey under green prosthetics, was the highest-grossing film of 2000 in the United States. A Beautiful Mind, with Russell Crowe as the mathematician John Nash, then won him the Academy Awards for best director and best picture, the second shared with Grazer. Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code and Frost/Nixon came after, the last of them bringing a second pair of nominations in the same two categories.

The case against Howard has always been the case for him. His films are lucid: the geography of a scene is never in doubt, and the emotional stakes are announced early and paid off on schedule. That clarity made him the director a studio calls when a production is in trouble, which is how he came to finish Solo: A Star Wars Story after Lucasfilm dismissed Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with weeks of shooting left. It also sands down material that needs its edges. Hillbilly Elegy, his Netflix adaptation of a best-selling memoir about Appalachian poverty, met widespread negative reviews, and In the Heart of the Sea lost money. The more revealing case is Eden, a vicious survival thriller about European settlers on the Galápagos island of Floreana, with Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby and Sydney Sweeney. It is the least ingratiating film he has made. It drew mixed notices after its Toronto premiere, struggled to find an American distributor and, when Vertical finally released it, took about $1 million in its first weekend across 664 theaters. The nicest man in Hollywood made his cruellest film and cinema audiences stayed away; it only found viewers later, when it climbed into Netflix’s US top ten.

The documentaries are where the late Howard looks freest. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week brought him a Grammy, and Pavarotti, We Feed People, about the chef José Andrés, and Jim Henson Idea Man turned archives into portraits of people who built something. Avedon is the most ambitious of them. Made with the Richard Avedon Foundation and drawing on stills and behind-the-lens footage never shown before, it had its world premiere as a special screening in the Official Selection at Cannes in May, and Netflix bought worldwide rights in July for a release before the end of the year. “I’ve always been drawn to stories that help us better understand remarkable people,” Howard said when the deal was announced.

Fiction has not been abandoned. Howard shot Alone at Dawn in Budapest for Amazon MGM, with Adam Driver as John Chapman, the Air Force combat controller killed in Afghanistan in 2002 and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, and with Anne Hathaway and Betty Gilpin in the cast. Production wrapped in February. Amazon MGM has set a platform release for Christmas Day 2027 before a wide opening in January 2028, the slot a studio reserves for a film it intends to campaign.

Off screen, the steadiness is real. Howard has been married to Cheryl Alley since June 1975; they have four children, among them the actress and director Bryce Dallas Howard and the actress Paige Howard. Last year he learned that he and Don Knotts, his co-star from Mayberry, were distant cousins, something neither man knew while Knotts was alive.

The next project may be a return to his biggest hit. Universal and Imagine are developing a sequel to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with Jim Carrey in talks to play the Grinch again and Howard expected to direct, though no deal had been closed when the project surfaced in June. Beside a war film, a photographer’s portrait and a Galápagos thriller that audiences skipped, it would be the one safe bet of his seventies, and the rest of the slate suggests that at 72 Howard no longer needs every film he makes to be liked.