&InputText=RON HOWARD (Director) won the Academy Award this year as Best Director of A Beautiful Mind, which also received Oscars for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay Adapted From Another Medium.  Howards many honors for this film also included the Directors Guild of America Award for outstanding directorial achievement in feature films.
	Howard has created some of films most memorable moments.  From the dramatic tension of A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13, to the knowing humor of Parenthood, to the tender magic of Cocoon, Howards films, produced under the Imagine Entertainment banner, possess a bittersweet quality that unites audiences in their shared experiences of loss, survival, passion, family and commitment.
	In 1995, Apollo 13 brought Howard his first Directors Guild of America Award.  He packed another powerful dramatic punch with Ransom in 1996, the taut suspense thriller starring Mel Gibson, Rene Russo, Gary Sinise and Delroy Lindo.  Backdraft, his 1991 film set in the world of firefighters, starred Kurt Russell, William Baldwin and Robert De Niro, and received four Academy Award nominations.
	He next filmed the lushly beautiful Far and Away, an epic love story starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
	Howards comedies, beginning with Night Shift, share a sympathy for the underdog.  His hilarious and insightful Parenthood was nominated for two Academy Awards.
	Howard has also created elaborate fantasy worlds for audiences, beginning with the beguiling Splash, and quickly followed by Cocoon, which won two Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for Don Ameche, and Willow, starring Val Kilmer.  In 2000, he took audiences into the amazing world of Whoville in Dr. Seuss How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey.
	In 1986, Howard and Brian Grazer founded Imagine Entertainment to create independently produced feature films.  In the intervening years, Imagine has produced a wide variety of popular films including The Nutty Professor and its sequence, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Liar Liar, Bowfinger, The Paper, Inventing the Abbotts and many others.  Howard was also one of the producers, along with Grazer and Tom Hanks, of the mini-series From the Earth to the Moon for HBO.  Before forming Imagine, Howard and Grazer had successfully collaborated on Night Shift in 1982, and again on Splash in 1984.  Howard directed his first feature film, Grand Theft Auto, in 1978.
	Audiences first came to know Howard as an actor.  Born in Duncan, Oklahoma, he made his screen debut in The Journey, and subsequently appeared in The Music Man and as Opie in the long-running television series The Andy Griffith Show.  In the 1970s, he starred in the television series Happy Days and drew favorable reviews for his performances in American Graffiti and The Shootist.


