Dennis Rush, the child actor who played Howie on The Andy Griffith Show and appeared as a young Lon Chaney Jr. opposite James Cagney in Man of a Thousand Faces, died Saturday on the way to a hospital in the San Diego area. He was 74.

Keith Thibodeaux said Rush died, recalling him as the boy who “played Lon Chaney Jr. in the James Cagney classic and Howie, one of Opie’s friends, on the beloved CBS sitcom.” Rush had been diagnosed with leukemia last month.

Rush’s screen career began early and moved quickly. Born in Philadelphia on June 10, 1951, he went to Los Angeles when he was 1 after his father, Jack, took a job as a film archivist at Universal. By 1957, Rush had made his onscreen debut as Creighton Chaney, age 4, in Man of a Thousand Faces, a role that came with six months of work. Rush later said of the experience, “It was just the best of the best.”

He also recalled how it happened. Cagney, looking for a child actor, told him, “I’m looking for a little boy to play my son, I’m making a movie called Man of a Thousand Faces.” Rush’s screen test included riding a tricycle around a Christmas tree, and Cagney later told him, “Trust me.” Dorothy Malone played his mother in the film, while Jim Backus played his uncle.

After that debut, Rush kept working in television. He appeared in seven episodes of Wagon Train from 1960 to 1962, including one directed by John Ford, and in three installments of Laramie from 1962 to 1963. His best-known run came on The Andy Griffith Show, where he appeared over three seasons from 1963 to 1965 as Howie.

Rush said in 2022 that he got “to be in eight episodes over about a 2 1/2-year period,” and remembered ad-libbing a line during rehearsal on the 1964 episode “Barney’s Physical.” He described the set with the kind of easy detail that comes from growing up around movie people: “If you were good, you got to go to the studio and have lunch with dad, it was kind of a big deal,” he said.

That is how Rush will be remembered: not as a star who chased attention, but as a child actor who turned up in some of the era’s most durable screen memories and then left behind a small, precise body of work that still travels. With his death Saturday, the last of those performances now belongs fully to the record.