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.
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.’”
In the episode, Ron takes on the job of raising her bird babies himself. He starts to like them – but has to set them free when they grow older.
Ron’s colleagues just stood and gaped when they saw what performance the young 10-year-old delivered.
And after” Opie the Birdman”, something happened to the young actor.
“When [the director] yelled ‘Cut !,’ I was still in my Method-y sad zone, but the mood around me was one of euphoria,” he recalled. “Everyone had just watched me ascend to a new level. From every angle, big adult hands extended toward me to shake mine, or tousle my hair, or pat me on the back in congratulation.
“In ‘Opie the Birdman,’ I had extended a part of myself into my performance. I had gone deep. I was no longer a child actor. I was an actor, period.”
The show launched Howard into the spotlight, but his success came at a price for the child actor. The family had already been living in California for two years when Howard got his big break but his prominence on the show meant he was bullied at school.
In the 2012 biography Ron Howard, author Hal Marcovitz quotes Howard revealing how despite being proud of his success he was embarrassed to talk about it.
