The 1973 co-star Ron Howard will always regret never directing in a movie: “It makes me a little sad”
Having been retired as a full-time actor since the early 1980s, Ron Howard has long since moved past the point of daydreaming about which fellow thespians he would have loved to share the screen with.
However, as a full-time director since the late 1970s with almost 30 features to his name, he’s well within his rights to lament the ones who got away on the other side of the camera, with the Academy Award-winning filmmaker regretting that he never got the chance to work with one of his favourite co-stars.
Technically, it’s a situation he’s not unfamiliar with, since Howard briefly shared some screentime with Jack Nicholson when the latter guest-starred in The Andy Griffith Show in the 1960s, but you couldn’t really call them co-stars, which didn’t stop the former from ruing the day the three-time Oscar-winning icon turned down the part of Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.
With a career that spans 70 years, with almost 50 of those spent wielding the megaphone, Howard has rubbed shoulders with stars of multiple generations. He must be the only person in Hollywood who’s directed Bette Davis and Sydney Sweeney, but despite his longevity, he never found the right part for Cindy Williams in any of his pictures.
Williams, who played Laurie, the girlfriend of Howard’s Steve, in George Lucas’ American Graffiti, also appeared in five episodes of Happy Days as Shirley Feeney, and they also crossed paths when his Richie Cunningham popped up in two episodes of the spinoff series Laverne & Shirley.
A friend and collaborator for five decades, when Williams passed away in January 2023 at the age of 75, Howard was heartbroken. “I’d always hoped that a part would come along that I could cast her in, and we can sort of complete this cycle of working together in our careers with me behind the camera, and the right role never came along,” he lamented.
“I always assumed it would,” Howard continued. “And it makes me a little sad to know that we’ll never have that chance.” It’s one of those things that’ll come back to haunt a person: she was always under consideration for a part in one of his movies, and it was something that was constantly at the back of his mind, but before he had the chance for that full circle moment, it was taken away.
In an ideal world, he would have cast her as “a character full of surprises, where you kind of think she’s one thing, and it turns out there’s more than you might have guessed,” the former child star explained. Williams, a Bafta nominee for American Graffiti and a Golden Globe nominee for Laverne & Shirley, was equally adept at drama and comedy, but a job in a Howard-helmed flick remained out of reach.
It’s a wish that will remain unfulfilled, but having worked together in a movie and two TV shows and remained close, with Howard sharing that Williams had “almost a big sister energy around me” dating back to their American Graffiti days, if there’s a silver lining, it’s that it’s not the kind of all-consuming regret that can crush someone.
