Ron Howard

Ron Howard has been on screen since the late 1950s. He was Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show from 1960 to 1968, Winthrop in the film of The Music Man in 1962, Steve Bolander in American Graffiti in 1973, and then Richie Cunningham on Happy Days for a decade. He directed his first feature, Grand Theft Auto, in 1977, and left Happy Days in 1984 to direct full time. Almost nobody has made that transition so completely.

What he is genuinely good at is procedure: competent people solving a problem under time pressure. Apollo 13 is three men in a metal box and a room full of engineers doing arithmetic, and Howard makes the arithmetic unbearable. The same instinct powers Backdraft, Cinderella Man, Rush and Thirteen Lives. He is a clarity director, never a stylist, and his films are legible to a fault.

That is also the limitation. Handed difficult or ambiguous material, his instinct is to smooth it, which is why the Dan Brown adaptations are inert and why Hillbilly Elegy flattened a contentious book into melodrama. A Beautiful Mind won him the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture and is the clearest case of both tendencies at once, immensely effective and notably tidy about a very untidy life.

His accolades run to two Oscars, seven Emmys, two Golden Globes and two Grammys, plus the National Medal of Arts in 2003 and induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 2013. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He also narrates Arrested Development, which may be the funniest thing he has ever done.