C Thomas Howell

Born: 7 December 1966
Where: Los Angeles, California

Despite an incredibly succesful debut in the film business - playing the role of Eliott's friend Tyler in Steven Spielberg's E.T. - C. Thomas Howell never managed to live up to the weight of expectation.

He followed his debut with the coveted role as Ponyboy Curtis in The Outsiders, and then landed a part in the action movie Red Dawn.

But just as his career was taking off, it peaked with the classic low-budget thriller The Hitcher, in which Howell's long distance journey across the States is interrupted by Rutger Hauer's psycho killer.

In his fifty or so feature films since, Howell's delivered few notable performances and his career steadily declined throughout the late 1980s.

He may have held brief teen idol status in the mid 1980s but some bad career choices have blown him off the radar into films such as Hot Boyz and The Prince and the Surfer.

He had started acting at a very young age, appearing in a TV series called The Little People.

He was a long-term friend of Rob and Chad Lowe as well as the Estevez-Sheen brothers and soon became immersed in the acting world.

Howell was then chosen by Francis Ford Coppola for the lead in the adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel, The Outsiders, alongside some of the top leading men of the day, including Swayze, Cruise, Lowe and Macchio. This led to the inevitable increase in expectation.

While many of the poster boys of his generation went on to forge successful careers, Howell starred in the forgettable Grandview USA, then teamed with Swayze and Charlie Sheen in the mildly succesful Red Dawn.

He had one of his best screen roles as the hapless driver who runs afoul of Rutger Hauer's hitcher, but after the box-office failure of A Tiger's Tale, Howell's career plummeted.

Breaking the Rules is often considered one of the worst movies of all time, and That Night which cast him as Juliette Lewis' bad boy beau, was also a disaster.

Howell again tried his hand a TV before in 1995, moving behind the camera to film Hourglass, a semi-sequel to The Hitcher that was released directly to video.

A similar fate befell his next effort, Pure Danger.

His most recent work includes the true-story-horror The Hillside Strangler, in which Howell played the serial killer Ken Bianchi.