Ronald William Howard (born March 1, 1954) is an Award-winning American actor and Academy Award-winning film director and producer, known for his roles on sitcoms, movies and television. The naturally red-headed Howard came to prominence in the 1960s as Andy Griffith's son, Opie Taylor, on The Andy Griffith Show, and later in the 1970s as Tom Bosley's son and Henry Winkler's best friend, Richie Cunningham, on Happy Days (a role he played from 1974 to 1980).
Ronald Ford Howard (born March 3, 1951 in Oakland, California) is a former professional American football player who played in six NFL seasons from 1974-1979 for the Dallas Cowboys, the Seattle Seahawks and the Buffalo Bills.
Howard played varsity football, basketball and track for Pasco High School for three years. As a senior, Howard led the Pasco basketball squad to a 25-1 record, with the one loss coming in the state championship game to Snohomish High School in overtime.
After graduating in 1970, Howard went on to become a basketball star at Seattle University. Although Seattle University had no football program, Howard was drafted by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, who had had their eye on him since he was a sophomore at Seattle U. Despite the odds, Howard made the Cowboys as a tight end and spent two seasons with the Cowboys, before moving back to Seattle for another three seasons with the Seattle Seahawks before injuries forced him out of the game. Howard’s team record for receptions by a tight-end in a season stood for nearly 30 years before being broken.
Howard works today as the House Administrator in the Seattle School District. He is part of the coaching staff for football, basketball, and track at Rainier Beach High School and is working towards his principleship credentials.
Ron was born in Oklahoma, into an acting family - his father had realized a boyhood dream of acting by attending the University of Oklahoma and majoring in drama, and his mother went through acting school in New York. He was in his first movie at 18 months, Frontier Woman (1956), although his first real part was at the age of 4. Soon a regular on "Playhouse 90" (1956), he was cast as Opie on "Andy Griffith Show, The" (1960), and later moved from a child in Mayberry to America's teenager as Richie Cunningham in "Happy Days" (1974). The life of a child star is certainly not routine, but Ron's parents wanted his life to be as normal as possible - he attended public schools and at age 15 even took nine months off to play a basketball season. The transition from child actor to adult actor is always difficult, but for Ron the real transition was from child actor to adult director. There were some film roles, such as Shootist, The (1976) for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, but his dream and now his focus was directing. He had begun shooting films at age 15 with a Super-8 camera, and after high school spent two years in a film program at the University of Southern California, but then left, feeling he could learn more from actual experience. That first film was the hardest to finance, but he struck a deal with Roger Corman - he would star in Eat My Dust (1976) and Corman would produce Grand Theft Auto (1977) which Howard would direct (he also wrote the script and starred). It was a success, and his directorial career was jump-started. Married since 1975 to his high school sweetheart, he, in 1997, is enjoying a life of telling stories as one of Hollywood's top directors.
