Ron Howard And His Brother Clint Confess The Harsh Reality Of Their Childhoods In The Spotlight

Ron and Clint Howard seem to be two rare examples of child stars who adjusted well to adult life. Ron is now an Oscar-winning director and the father of another major Hollywood star, while Clint is still a prolific actor. But in a book that the brothers wrote together about their early lives, they revealed that the transition wasn’t always as easy as it may have seemed.

Screen debut

If you were a child in the late 1970s, you may think that Ron Howard’s career started on Happy Days. But he first shot to fame a whole decade earlier playing Opie in another classic sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show. And Ron actually made his screen debut at the age of just 18 months in 1956 movie Frontier Woman.

An alien child

As for Clint, he also racked up an impressive resume in his youth. The star appeared in TV hits such as Night Gallery, The Streets of San Francisco, and perhaps most famously Star Trek. A six-year-old Clint showed up in “The Cormobite Maneuver” episode playing an extraterrestrial with a child’s body.  

Working together

The pair also worked together on several occasions including on The Andy Griffith Show. And that’s something they continued to do in their adult careers, too. You may have spotted Clint in both Star Wars spinoff Solo and true-life space disaster tale Apollo 13, both of which were helmed by brother Ron.  

A Hollywood memoir

And in 2017 the famous brothers once again joined forces, only this time for the page rather than the screen. As its title suggests, The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family saw Ron and Clint reflect on their lives in the spotlight. But what had inspired them to pen a book together after all these years?