Rise to Fame
He was Opie Taylor from age 6, then Richie Cunningham from 19. When Happy Days became the #1-rated show in 1976, Fonzie was the reason, not him. He left before season 8 to direct, trading in America's favorite sitcom for a deal with Roger Corman: act in Eat My Dust! and Corman would let him direct Grand Theft Auto (1977). Night Shift (1982) proved the pivot wasn't nostalgia. Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind proved it was the right call entirely.
In the Spotlight
A Beautiful Mind won him Best Director in 2002, and Frost/Nixon got him nominated again in 2009. The prestige formula mostly holds. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) was a mid-production rescue job after the original directors got fired, and it showed. His 2025 Galapagos thriller Eden pulled streaming numbers but landed critically as "an ambitious disappointment." Alone at Dawn, starring Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway, is the next test.
Side Notes
Born into it: his father Rance Howard was a working actor, his mother Jean Speegle an actress, and he had his first screen appearance at 18 months old. He and producer Brian Grazer co-founded Imagine Entertainment in 1985, which has backed everything from Arrested Development to 8 Mile to The Da Vinci Code. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for film and one for television, which is exactly as on-brand as it sounds.