Howard is married to Actress Debra Winger. He has two sons, Sam Howard (born 1987) from his previous marriage to talent agent Karen Sellars and Gideon "Babe" Howard (born 1997) with Winger.
Howard established his career with stand-out roles in Natural Born Killers, Full Metal Jacket, and Ruby. In Till Death Us Do Part (1992), Howard portrayed author and attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who led the prosecution in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. In 1997, he co-starred in Jurassic Park's sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, as Hammond's conniving nephew Peter Ludlow, a greedy and manipulative businessman.
Howard has extensive stage credits, including a role in the 2009 revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone on Broadway. He has appeared in several productions at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, with his wife, Debra Winger, and Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities, directed by Robert Woodruff. He was also seen as Mikhail Lvovich Astrov in Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya, and Nikolai Ivanov in the playwright's Ivanov, with Winger playing the role of Anna.
Arliss has had a recurring role in the CBS weekly drama series Medium and has directed several episodes. He also starred in and directed the films Big Bad Love and Dawn Anna, both co-written with James Howard, his brother. His wife, Debra Winger, stars in both films. In 2010 he played Kale Ingram, a benignly duplicitous supervisor at an American intelligence agency in the cerebral TV series Rubicon, which was canceled by AMC after 13 episodes. Howard appeared in the 2011 feature Moneyball.
