Leslie Howard (actor)

Infobox actor
bgcolour = silver
name = Leslie Howard


imagesize = 250px
caption = in the film "Of Human Bondage" (1934)
birthdate = birth date|1893|4|3|mf=y
location = Forest Hill, London, England, United Kingdom
deathdate = death date and age|1943|6|1|1893|4|3|mf=y
deathplace = Bay of Biscay
birthname = Leslie Howard Steiner
yearsactive = 1917 - 1942
academyawards =

Leslie Howard (April 3, 1893 - June 1, 1943) was an English stage and Academy Award nominated film actor. He is best known by international audiences as Ashley Wilkes in the film "Gone with the Wind". He was an accomplished actor whose film roles included Professor Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" (1938), "The Petrified Forest" (1936) and "Intermezzo (1939).

Early life

He was born Leslie Howard Steiner to a Hungarian Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner, and an English Jewish mother, Lillian Blumberg, in Forest Hill, London and educated at Dulwich College, London. (In later years, Howard usually listed his birth name as Stainer despite clear records of the correct spelling.) He worked as a bank clerk before enlisting at the outbreak of World War I. He served in the British Army as subaltern in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, but suffered severe shell shock, which led to him relenquishing his commission in May 1916.

Theatre career

Howard began acting on stage in London in 1917 but had his greatest success on Broadway, gaining fame in plays like "Aren't We All?" (1923), "Outward Bound" (1924), and "The Green Hat" (1925) before becoming an undisputed Broadway star in "Her Cardboard Lover" (1927). His enormous success as time traveler Peter Standish in "Berkeley Square" in 1929 was his greatest triumph in the theatre and resulted in a call to Hollywood the following year, but the stage continued to be an important part of his career. He usually served as either producer or director of the Broadway productions he starred in (frequently performing both duties) and was also a playwright, starring in the New York productions of his plays "Murray Hill" (1927) and "Out of a Blue Sky" (1930). Howard also wrote, but did not act in the 1936 play "Elizabeth Sleeps Out".

Howard was always better known for his acting, enjoying triumphs in "The Animal Kingdom" (1932) and "The Petrified Forest" (1935), immortalising both roles on film. But he had the bad timing to open in "Hamlet" on Broadway in 1936 just a few weeks after John Gielgud had had a resounding success in a rival production of Shakespeare’s play that was far more successful with both critics and audiences. Howard’s production lasted 39 performances in New York before it was withdrawn. It proved to be Howard’s final stage role.

Film career

Howard often played stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen in films such as the film version of his great stage success "Berkeley Square" (1933), for which he was nominated for a Academy Award for Best Actor. He played "The Scarlet Pimpernel" in 1934 and in 1938 played Professor Higgins in "Pygmalion", which earned him another Oscar nomination. He appeared in the film version of "Outward Bound" but in a different role from the one he'd portrayed in the Broadway cast.

In 1936 he appeared in "The Petrified Forest". It was Howard who reportedly insisted that Humphrey Bogart appear in the film as gangster Duke Mantee. They had previously appeared in the play together on Broadway and became lifelong friends; the Bogarts named their daughter Leslie after him. As a parody, Friz Freleng's 1937 cartoon "She Was an Acrobat's Daughter" portrays a cinema audience watching "The Petrified Florist", starring Bette Savis and Lester Coward.

"The Petrified Forest" was one of several films in which Howard co-starred with Bette Davis. They also appeared together in the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" and the 1937 romantic comedy "It's Love I'm After" (also starring Olivia de Havilland). Howard starred with Ingrid Bergman in the 1939 film "Intermezzo" and Norma Shearer in the 1936 film version of "Romeo and Juliet". Howard is perhaps best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in the epic "Gone with the Wind" (1939), but he was uncomfortable with Hollywood and returned to Britain to help with the World War II war effort. He directed and starred in a number of World War II films, including "The First of the Few" (which he also produced) and "Forty-Ninth Parallel" with Laurence Olivier. In "Forty-Ninth Parallel" Howard played an English eccentric who is wounded while capturing a Nazi.

Death

Howard died in 1943 when he was returning to England from Lisbon on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines/BOAC Flight 777. The aircraft was shot down by a German Junkers Ju 88 over the Bay of Biscay.cite book |last=Goss |first=Christopher H. |title=Bloody Biscay: The History of V Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 40 |year=2001 |publisher=Crécy Publishing |location=Manchester |id=ISBN 0-947554-87-4 |pages=50-56 ] It has been rumoured that Howard was engaged in secret war work at the time, and that the Germans believed the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had been in Algiers, to be on board. Howard's manager, Alfred Chenhalls, physically resembled Churchill, while Howard was tall and thin, like Churchill's bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson. However, this story has been completely discredited. Churchill himself seems to have been to blame for the spread of it; in his autobiography, he expresses sorrow that a mistake about his activities might have cost Howard his life.

The truth, revealed in several exhaustively detailed books such as "Bloody Biscay" (which comes to a slightly different conclusion), "Flight 777" by Ian Colvin, and "In Search of My Father" by Howard's actor son Ronald, is that the Germans were almost certainly out to shoot down the plane in order to kill Howard himself. [Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard ISBN 0-312-41161-8] His intelligence-gathering activities (while ostensibly on "entertainer goodwill" tours), as well as the chance to demoralise Britain with the loss of one of its most outspokenly patriotic figures, were behind the Luftwaffe attack. Ronald Howard's book, in particular, explores in great detail written German orders to the Staffel assigned to intercept the airliner, as well as communiques on the British side which verify intelligence reports of the time indicating a deliberate attack on Howard. It also makes clear that the Germans were well aware of Churchill's whereabouts at the time and were not so naïve as to believe the British Prime Minister would be traveling alone aboard an unescorted and unarmed civilian airliner when both the secrecy and air power of the British government were at his command. [Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard ISBN 0-312-41161-8]

Howard was traveling through Spain and Portugal, ostensibly lecturing on film, but also meeting with local propagandists and shoring up support for the Allied cause. The Germans in all probability suspected even more surreptitious activities. (German agents were active throughout Spain and Portugal, which, like Switzerland, was a crossroads for persons from both sides of the conflict, but even more accessible to Allied citizens.) A book by Spanish writer José Rey-Ximena called 'El Vuelo del Ibis' ('The Flight of the Ibis') claims that Howard was on a top secret mission for Churchill to warn Franco to keep out of the war. Howard had contacts with Ricardo Gimenez-Arnau, head of Spains Foreign Office via an old girlfriend, Conchita Montenegro.

Ronald Howard, Leslie's son, was of the conviction that the orders to liquidate Leslie came from Goebbels, who had been ridiculed in one of Howard's films and who believed Howard to be the most dangerous propagandist in the British service. [Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard ISBN 0-312-41161-8]

Howard was flying from Portela (Lisbon), Portugal back home to England on a regularly scheduled flight that did not pass over what would commonly be referred to as a war zone. The Luftwaffe records indicate that the Staffel was sent beyond its normal patrol area to intercept and shoot down the airliner, even though this flight had never before been disrupted. There were about fourteen other passengers, most of them either British executives with corporate ties in Portugal, or various British comparatively lower echelon government functionaries. There were also two or three children, the offspring of British military personnel. [Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard ISBN 0-312-41161-8] The DC-3 was attacked by eight German JU-88s, despite the fact that Luftwaffe patrols in the nearest normal vicinity usually consisted of single planes. According to German documents, the plane was shot down at longitude 10.15 West, latitude 46.07 North, some convert|500|mi|km from Bordeaux, France. (The DC-3's last radio message indicated it was being fired upon at longitude 09.37 West, latitude 46.54 North.) The German pilots photographed the wreckage floating in the Bay of Biscay. After the war, copies of these captured photos were sent to Howard's family. [Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard ISBN 0-312-41161-8] cite book |last=Goss |first=Christopher H. |title=Bloody Biscay: The History of V Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 40 |year=2001 |publisher=Crécy Publishing |location=Manchester |id=ISBN 0-947554-87-4 |pages=50-56 ]

Christopher Goss's book "Bloody Biscay", however, quotes Oberleutnant Herbert Hintze, Staffel Führer of 14 Staffel, based in Bordeaux, France, as remarking that his Staffel shot down the DC-3 merely because the plane was recognised as an enemy aircraft, unaware that it was an unarmed civilian plane. Hintze states that his fellow Staffel pilots were angry that the Luftwaffe had not informed them of a scheduled flight between Lisbon and the UK, and that had they known, they could easily have escorted the plane to Bordeaux and captured it and all aboard.cite book |last=Goss |first=Christopher H. |title=Bloody Biscay: The History of V Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 40 |year=2001 |publisher=Crécy Publishing |location=Manchester |id=ISBN 0-947554-87-4 |pages=50-56 ] More recently, Spanish author Jose Rey-Ximena has claimed in a book that the actor's plane was shot down as he was returning to England from a secret mission ordered by then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to dissuade Franco from joining the war with Hitler and Mussolini . [http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2008/10/06/Book_Howard_kept_Spain_from_joining_WWII/UPI-48541223340587/]

Personal life

Howard's will revealed an estate of £62,761. [ Parker, John, "Who's Who in the Theatre", 10th revised edition, Pitmans, London, 1947: 1939] He was married to Ruth Martin in 1916. They had two children. His son Ronald also became an actor, noted for portraying Sherlock Holmes in a 1954 half-hour television series, and wrote one of the few biographies of Leslie Howard: "In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard" ISBN 0-312-41161-8). His daughter, Leslie Ruth Howard, also wrote a biography entitled, "A Quite Remarkable Father."

Leslie Howard's younger brother, Arthur, was also an actor, primarily in British comedies. His sister Irene Howard was a costume designer.

Howard, widely known as a ladies' man, [Howard, Ronald. "In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard" ISBN 0-312-41161-8] is reported to have had an affair with Merle Oberon while filming "The Scarlet Pimpernel", Tallulah Bankhead when they appeared onstage in "Her Cardboard Lover" and Conchita Montenegro, with whom he appeared in the 1931 film "Never the Twain Shall Meet".

elected filmography

*"Outward Bound" (1930) - Tom Prior
*"A Free Soul" (1931) - Dwight Winthrop
*"Reserved for Ladies" (1932) - Max Tracey
*"Smilin' Through" (1932) - Sir John Carteret
*"Secrets" (1933) - John Carlton
*"Berkeley Square" (1933) - Peter Standish
*"Of Human Bondage" (1934) - Philip Carey
*" The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1934) - Sir Percy Blakeney/The Scarlet Pimpernel
*"The Petrified Forest" (1936) - Alan Squier
*"Romeo and Juliet" (1936) - Romeo
*"Stand-In" (1937) - Atterbury Dodd
*"It's Love I'm After" (1937) - Basil Underwood
*"Pygmalion" (1938) - Professor Henry Higgins
*"Intermezzo" (1939) - Holger Brandt
*"Gone with the Wind" (1939) - Ashley Wilkes
*"Pimpernel Smith" (1941) - Professor Horatio Smith
*"Forty-Ninth Parallel" (1941) - Philip Armstrong Scott
*"The First of the Few" (1942) - R.J. Mitchell

References

External links

*imdb name | id=0001366 | name=Leslie Howard
*
*tcmdb name | id=89646 | name=Leslie Howard
*ibdb name | id=7293 | name=Leslie Howard

Persondata
NAME= Howard, Leslie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES= Steiner, Leslie Howard
SHORT DESCRIPTION=actor
DATE OF BIRTH= April 3, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH= Forest Hill, London, England, United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH= June 1, 1943
PLACE OF DEATH= Bay of Biscay