Ron Howard Says His ‘Tremendous Modest Wedding ceremony’ Amid Joyful Days Fame Price Solely $800

Fifty years in the past, on June 27, 1975, Ron Howard placed on a sky blue tux to marry his highschool sweetheart, Cheryl Alley, whom he’d first met in Mrs. McBride’s English class.

As well-known as he was at 21 years previous, the Joyful Days star and the bride stored it low key.

“It was a small, very modest marriage ceremony in Burbank, California,” Howard, 71, tells PEOPLE for this week’s cowl story. “And it was necessary to Cheryl’s dad that he pay for it, so subsequently it was necessary to Cheryl to not let it get out of hand.” 

“We despatched out invites to 300 individuals and Cheryl stored saying, ‘That is big.’ My mother stored saying, ‘They will not all present up,’ ” remembers Howard. “And that church was chock-a-block full. It was all people from The Andy Griffith Present, all people from Joyful Days and so many different buddies, Cheryl’s buddies as effectively.” 

“It was an important day,” he says. “My mother and pop had a small type of champagne punch reception again at their home. The entire thing was tremendous modest, however you understand what? By God it labored.”

In Howard’s 2021 memoir about his adolescence, The Boys, co-written along with his brother Clint, 66, he revealed the marriage price simply $800, “together with the worth of the gown.” As he wrote, “We had no reception, only a easy ceremony adopted by cake and nonalcoholic punch within the church’s courtyard.”

As he waited for Cheryl to stroll up the aisle, Howard tells PEOPLE, he felt “absolute certainty,” including, “I feel Cheryl may’ve had just a little runaway-bride nervousness, and I do not assume we ever went fairly that far. However I feel she was extra conscious that she was type of coming into a world that she did not actually know something about, present enterprise.”

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“We knew we liked one another,” he provides. “We simply had that instantly. However I feel for her, she acknowledged there was a accountability that was going to be required of her. I felt none of that, and he or she did not discuss that on the time. Later we did.”

The couple had 4 children — daughter Bryce Dallas, now 44, twins Paige and Jocelyn, 40, and son Reed, 38 — and so they left Los Angeles for Connecticut to lift them exterior of Hollywood,

This previous June, the director, who has a brand new movie, Eden (a Nineteen Thirties survival thriller a couple of small European colony on a distant island within the Galapagos), and his spouse celebrated their fiftieth anniversary by donating a “kissing bench,” to the Johnny Carson Park in Burbank, the place, as smitten teenagers, they’d kissed and canoodled after faculty.

“I simply knew I wished to be with Cheryl, and that we might be nice collectively,” he says, wanting again. “If you happen to would’ve requested me then, will you have fun your fiftieth marriage ceremony anniversary? I might’ve mentioned, ‘Yeah, if we stay that lengthy, completely.’ I used to be simply so positive.”