Arliss Howard

Leslie Richard Howard, known professionally as Arliss Howard, was born on October 18, 1954, in Independence, Missouri. He holds an English literature degree from Columbia College. Before pursuing acting, Howard worked in the Wyoming oil industry, on a ranch in New Mexico, and spent time living in Hawaii.

Howard built his screen career through a series of film roles beginning in the late 1980s. He appeared in Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Tequila Sunrise (1988), followed by Men Don't Leave (1990), Ruby (1992), The Sandlot (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995). In 1997, he took on two roles in films directed by Steven Spielberg: the villain Peter Ludlow, John Hammond's nephew, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun in Amistad. His television work earned him two CableACE Award nominations, for Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture and The Man Who Captured Eichmann, with a win for the former.

Howard has also worked as a writer and director. He starred in and directed Big Bad Love (2001) and Dawn Anna (2005), both co-written with his brother James Howard. His wife, actress Debra Winger, appeared in both films. Howard additionally held a recurring role in the NBC drama series Medium and directed several of its episodes. In 2009, he starred in the science fiction film The Time Traveler's Wife, and in 2010 played intelligence supervisor Kale Ingram in the AMC series Rubicon, which was cancelled after thirteen episodes. He appeared in Moneyball in 2011 and starred in Mank in 2020, the same year he joined the cast of a CBS political drama pilot, Ways & Means, alongside Patrick Dempsey.

Howard's stage work includes productions at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he appeared in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive and Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities, the latter directed by Robert Woodruff. He also portrayed Mikhail Lvovich Astrov in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Nikolai Ivanov in Chekhov's Ivanov, with Winger playing Anna in the latter production. His Broadway credit is the 2009 revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Howard is married to Debra Winger. He has two sons: Sam, born in 1987 from his previous marriage to talent agent Karen Sellars, and Gideon, born in 1997, with Winger.