The performance that cemented Ron Howard’s love of acting
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having a fire lit under your ass to motivate you. Sometimes it comes in the form of a letdown, or in Ron Howard’s case, it came in the form of some competition from decades prior.
Howard’s career started incredibly early. He was only five when he was first cast on The Andy Griffith Show to play Opie Taylor. He was so young, in fact, that even the show’s credits called him a childish nickname: Ronny Howard.
For eight years, that was his life as he starred in 243 episodes of the show. For a young boy, it was tough work but half way through his second season, he saw something that pushed him to work even harder.
“Armed with my newfound confidence that second season, I started watching TV and movies differently,” Howard said. As if he suddenly became aware that he was an actor and wanted to be an actor, he started paying attention to the things he was watching, and specifically to the performances by other young kids on screen.
“Dad took me to a screening of the original, 1931 version of The Champ, the King Vidor boxing picture that starred Wallace Beery in the title role and Jackie Cooper as his son,” Howard recalled of a truly formative moment. At the time the movie was made, Cooper was nine but yet Howard was totally blown away by his ability.
“Cooper was incredible. I couldn’t get over how believable he was in the movie’s final scene, when his father is dead and all the grown-ups are trying to console him,” he said. It was acting like he’d never seen before, full of nuance and subtly as the actor remembered, “His face alone does incredibly complicated work, mustering a range of faint smiles to oblige his consolers but not masking his actual state of profound grief.”
Suddenly, the game was on. He wanted to be as good as that.
“Cooper’s performance, along with my newly accumulated movie experience, triggered my competitive juices,” he said. It was no longer about turning up for work and just doing his job. He wanted to be the best actor he could be, even if he was still basically a baby.
But he couldn’t help it. Now, comparing his work to the work of others, he was in intense training each time he turned the TV on. “When I watched a kid actor on a TV show, I evaluated his performance and compared it to what I was doing on Andy Griffith,” he said, “I took inventory of my contemporaries: Johnny Crawford on The Rifleman, Jay North on Dennis the Menace, Jon Provost on Lassie, the Leave It to Beaver guys, the My Three Sons guys.”
It not only pushed him to be better, but it made it crystal clear that this is what he wanted to do and that the desire to improve his skill was merely a young certainty that he wanted to be an actor, and he wanted to be a great one.
