Daughter's Weird Preschool Moment That Caused Ron Howard to Flee Hollywood and Refuse to Return to This Day
Legendary TV actor and film director Ron Howard recently said he packed up his family and left Los Angeles permanently after someone handed his then-child daughter a script and asked her to bring it home for him to read.
The plan backfired. Not only did the script not become one of Howard’s award-winning movies, but the gimmick actually sent him seeking a decent place to raise his family — far from Hollywood
Howard recently spoke about his career and family during a sit-down chat on “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” in which he was accompanied by his daughter, actress Bryce Dallas Howard.
The actress has built a career for herself after starring in films such as “The Village” and “Spider-Man 3.”
But she told Bensinger she was not even in kindergarten yet in the mid-1980s when she was solicited by a would-be screenwriter.
“Apparently, one day someone, when I was at preschool, they gave me a script to bring home to my dad,” she said. “I think assuming that maybe then my dad would read it and somehow turn around and be like, ‘Yes! This is the movie I’m doing.’”
The incident rubbed her parents the wrong way, she explained. It left them reevaluating their life in Southern California.
“I think my parents realized that being raised in Los Angeles, so much of the culture of this city is centered around the entertainment industry,” she said. “And they sort of didn’t want to raise us in an environment that felt that singular.”
Her father, the former child star of shows “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Happy Days,” said he and his wife Cheryl had already heard rumblings about trying to raise a family in the industry.
“We were hearing stories about kindergarten kids being taunted by other kindergarten kids saying, ‘My dad’s hotter than your dad,’” the “Hillbilly Elegy” director said.
He and Cheryl ended up relocating their four children to rural Connecticut, where they were each raised quietly and encouraged to forge their own paths in life near Greenwich.
“My parents were protective. They weren’t bringing me to premieres or anything like that,” Bryce said. “When we moved out to the East Coast … I was in nature, and I grew up on a farm, which was not really a farm. It was just some land with a lot of pets.”
Bryce added, “My mom was really strict, and she was strict for good reason. My parents weren’t going to give us their money.”
“They don’t believe in that. So they knew that when we were 18, we were going to need to take care of ourselves.”
The “Apollo 13” director told Bensinger he made the move to the East Coast as he launched his own production company and as he was actively working in the entertainment industry.
It might have been inconvenient, but it helped him raise four children who, he said, each fill him with a sense of pride.
Howard’s career spans decades, and his movies have earned him Academy Awards and other accolades — and the adoration of cinema fans. But it is abundantly clear that he does not measure his life solely by awards, which tells a story by itself.
Howard is arguably one of the few iconic directors who is still working and who has remained in tune with audiences nationwide.
That is in spite of the fact he was raised as a star and can probably be attributed at least in part to the fact he left Hollywood decades ago.
The acclaimed director was actually begged to return to the city by people in his inner circle, but he rebuffed them. One of those people was Howard’s creative partner Brian Glazer.
Howard summarized Los Angeles as “constricting” and “emotionally reductive.”
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