C. Thomas Howell

C. Thomas Howell is one of those actors who defined what it felt like to be young and restless in the early 1980s, and I genuinely think he doesn't get enough credit for it. He was already rubbing shoulders with Spielberg as a teenager in E.T., then turned around and anchored Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders as Ponyboy Curtis — one of the most iconic teen roles of the decade. Red Dawn the same year just cemented his status as the go-to face for a generation of coming-of-age cinema. He never quite made the full leap to A-list stardom the way some of his Outsiders castmates did, but he kept working steadily as an actor, director, and producer, carving out a respectable career on his own terms. There's something genuinely admirable about that kind of longevity without the Hollywood machine propping you up.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

C. Thomas Howell

Name (Japanese)

C・トーマス・ハウエル

Reading

C・とーます・はうえる

Born

December 7, 1966 (age 59)

Origin

Van Nuys, California, United States

Occupation

film director / screenwriter / film producer / film actor / actor

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Horse

High school

Saugus High School

Filmography / notable works

• Official sitehttp://cthomashowell.info
• Xhttps://x.com/cthomashowell
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.%20Thomas%20Howell
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%E3%83%BB%E3%83%88%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E3%82%B9%E3%83%BB%E3%83%8F%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A8%E3%83%AB
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q464522

Tags

• California
• film director
• screenwriter
• film producer

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.