From his days as wholesome Richie Cunningham in Happy Days to winning an Academy Award for best director for the movie A Beautiful Mind to being honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to TV and the big screen, Howard has continued to rise.
He got his first big break at 6 years old, playing Opie Taylor, the son of Sheriff Andy Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show.
Every week from 1960 through 1968, millions of viewers would tune in to watch the CBS comedy show, which started out in black and white.
In 2021, the award-winning actor has talked about one particular episode of the show, where he advanced his skills as an actor.
The episode, aired in 1963 as the first of the fourth season, is considered one of the best in the show’s history. It’s called “Opie the Birdman” and centers around Ron Howard’s character. Opie is outdoors shooting a slingshot, and suddenly, he happens to kill a mother bird.
“He picks the bird up and holds it in both hands, begging, ‘Fly away. Please! Fly away!’… The bird falls back to the ground like a lead weight,” Howard wrote. “In tears, Opie backs away in horror and then runs into the house, aghast at what he has done.”
Ron Howard, who was ten years old when shooting the episode, revealed that this particular scene was special to him. Andy Griffith personally claimed that it was his favorite episode during their eight seasons of acting together with Ron.
In his memoir “The Boys,” Howard reveals how the episode when he kills the bird demanded something extraordinary acting.
To cope with the scene, Ron took the help of his father, Randy. Randy also worked as an actor and appeared in several episodes of the show. He used to accompany Ron to the set of The Andy Griffith Show. According to Ron, Randy made him evoke the emotions needed for the episode.
“I have vivid memories of ‘Opie the Birdman’ because I’d had a dog named Gulliver who had been hit by a car and in sort of getting to the emotional place of doing those scenes, my dad reminded me of Gulliver,” Ron told the Television Academy Foundation. “And how I felt. He was giving me the method then. Those emotional scenes came from a personal, very real place for me. I was not faking stuff.”
“They rolled camera. And as I picked up that prop bird and implored it to live, I thought of Gulliver. For the first time as an actor, I cried real tears and trembled real trembles. I’d come a long way from my subpar display of emotion in [the show’s first episode] ‘The New Housekeeper.’”
