Ron Howard : The Man Behind The Magic

CHILD STAR. TEEN ICON. ACCLAIMED FILMMAKER—AND DEVOTED FAMILY MAN. HOW HOLLYWOOD’S FAVORITE SON REMAINED ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS

- LIZ MCNEIL,CELESTE SLOMAN

A freckle-faced kid from Duncan, Okla., captures America’s heart on a beloved show about a widowed father and his son, then becomes a varsity-jacketed teen star on a top ’70s sitcom. He strikes out on his own to become a director, defying skeptics and delivering a string of crowd-pleasing hits—and winning an Oscar—while raising four kids with his wife, the red-haired girl he met in Mrs. McBride’s English class in Burbank. If a screenwriter had pitched the life story of Ron Howard, the script might have been laughed off as too good to be true. But the baseball-capped showbiz legend is living proof that sometimes, even in Hollywood, nice guys really can finish first. Says Howard: “I’m an optimist. That’s just my nature.”

Along the way, Howard has worked with everyone from Jimmy Stewart and Bette Davis to Nicole Kidman and Seth Rogen. (His recent cameo on Rogen’s show The Studio just garnered Howard his first Emmy nomination.) A genre-hopping master, he’s told the tales of a man who falls in love with a mermaid in the surprise 1984 hit Splash and the astronauts who survived a disastrous 1970 mission to the moon in the spellbinding Apollo 13, now celebrating its 30th anniversary with a Sept. 19 release in IMAX. His latest movie, Eden, starring Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney and Ana de Armas, is a true-life 1930s survival thriller about a small European colony on a remote island in the Galapagos. “It’s a labor of love,” he says of Eden. “It’s experimental. A bit of a lark. Everybody said, ‘Let’s just go for eight weeks and bring this crazy story to life.’”

At 71, Howard is also the kind of low-key star who typically requests just 10 minutes of grooming before a photo session and takes advantage of a