Ron Howard has had quite the career. When he was just two years old, he got his start in the industry with a tiny part in the film Frontier Woman, before appearing in various television episodes, eventually landing a regular role on The Andy Griffith Show. Throughout the 1960s, Howard was a prolific child star, but by the following decade, he was ready for bigger things.
He acted in movies like American Graffiti, The Spikes Gang, and The Shootist, as well as appearing in the hit sitcom Happy Days between 1974 and 1980, but in 1977, he made his directorial debut with Grand Theft Auto, which was received negatively. Still, it proved more successful at the box office, leading him to make various other popular movies throughout the 1980s, like Splash, starring Tom Hanks, and the fantasy movie Willow.
Since then, Howard has become one of the most prolific filmmakers in Hollywood, finding acclaim with movies as diverse as Apollo 13, another Hanks number, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and A Beautiful Mind, which won him a ‘Best Director’ Oscar.
The actor-turned-filmmaker has enjoyed a long tenure in the entertainment industry; after all, it’s all he has ever known. Howard has watched Hollywood change drastically, as well as pop culture itself. He saw the rise of classic musicians like the Beatles and The Who in real time, who, in turn, became fans of Howard.
During the 1970s, Happy Days was massive, and it seemed that even some of the most successful musicians of the era, including the Fab Four’s Ringo Starr and The Who’s drummer Keith Moon, found the time to squeeze watching it into their busy schedules. This led the pair to visit the set, with Howard recalling how he tried to get them to cameo in an episode. “They wandered onto our set one day and Henry Winkler and I were trying to get them to put on Fifties clothes and be in the show, but we couldn’t cajole them into it,” he revealed during an interview with The Mail.
He added, “Well, when I worked with Ringo a couple of years ago, I was surprised he could remember visiting. He said, ‘I’m sure Keith had no idea where he was, but I had a laugh!’” Howard reunited with Starr for The Beatles: Eight Days a Week in 2016, a documentary about the band’s time as live performers. It was highly acclaimed, with Howard’s evident love for the band bleeding through.
Discussing his love for The Beatles in another interview with Parade, Howard shared, “I loved them, I loved their music. Because I was already a kid actor and around the creative process, I actually picked up on their evolution. In making the movie [Eight Days a Week], I think the thing that I probably respect the most is that in the midst of the gauntlet of what was Beatlemania and all the social upheaval of that time, their artistic growth never stopped, it just accelerated.”
Sadly, we never got to see Howard collaborate with Starr on Happy Days, but the filmmaker can rest easy knowing that was able to dedicate a whole documentary to The Beatles later on in his career.
