Leslie Howard (actor)
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- For the Australian pianist see Leslie Howard
Leslie Howard (April 3, 1893 – June 1, 1943) was a British film actor. Born Leslie Howard Stainer to a Hungarian Jewish father and an English Jewish mother in Forest Hill, London, Howard's classic good looks won him his first screen role in a 1914 silent film, following which he served in World War I, his military career being cut short due to case of severe shell shock.
Howard proceeded to play stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen in films such as Berkeley Square (1933, for which he was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Pygmalion (1938) (in which he played Professor Higgins, and earned another Oscar nomination), and Pimpernel Smith (1941).
In 1936, Howard appeared in the film The Petrified Forest. It was Howard who insisted that Humphrey Bogart appear in the film as gangster Duke Mantee. They had appeared in the play together on Broadway. Howard and Bogart became lifelong friends; the Bogarts named their daughter Leslie Howard after him.
His blue-blood persona landed him the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939), but he was uncomfortable with Hollywood and returned to Britain to help with the war effort. He directed and starred in a number of World War II films, including The First of the Few (1942), a biopic of Spitfire designer R.J. Mitchell, and Pimpernel Smith (1941), an updated version of The Scarlet Pimpernel. He also starred in Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941).
In 1943 he visited Lisbon (some say on a secret mission), and on the return flight his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe over the Bay of Biscay, possibly because the Germans believed the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had been in Algiers, to be on board. The possibility of mistaken identity is increased as Howard's manager, Alfred Chenhalls, physically resembled Churchill, while Howard was tall and thin, like Churchill's bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson.
Howard was married to Ruth Martin in 1916. They had two children, a son, Ronald, and a daughter, Leslie Ruth, both of whom wrote biographies of their father (Ronald wrote In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard ISBN 0-312-41161-8). His younger brother, Arthur, was also an actor, primarily in British comedies.
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