Leslie Howard Steiner (3 April 18931 June 1943), better known by his stage name Leslie Howard, was an English stage and film actor, director, and producer. One of his best-known roles was as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939) along with his roles in Berkeley Square (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), The Petrified Forest (1936), Pygmalion (1938) and Intermezzo (1939).

Early life

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

Theatre career

Howard began acting on the London stage in 1917 but had his greatest theatrical success in the United States on Broadway in New York City, New York, 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 (1929) resulted, the following year, in a call to Hollywood (where he also later repeated the Standish role in a 1933 film version of the play).

The stage, however, continued to be an important part of his career. He usually served as either producer or director of the Broadway productions in which he starred (frequently juggling acting/producer/director duties in the same production). Howard was also a playwright, starring in the Broadway productions of his plays Murray Hill (1927) and Out of a Blue Sky (1930); he also wrote, but did not act in Elizabeth Sleeps Out (1936).

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

Film career

Howard often played stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen, such as — repeating his stage role — in the film version of Berkeley Square (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. He played the title character in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) and later Professor Henry Higgins in film version of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1938), which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He appeared in the film version of Outward Bound (1930) but in a different role from the one he had portrayed in the Broadway cast.

He co-starred with Bette Davis in The Petrified Forest (1936) and it was Howard who reportedly insisted that Humphrey Bogart appear in the film as gangster Duke Mantee. Howard and Bogart had previously appeared in the play together on Broadway and became lifelong friends; the Bogarts named their daughter Leslie after him. After the film's release, Friz Freleng, as a parody, made the short-length cartoon She Was an Acrobat's Daughter (1937) that portrays a cinema audience watching The Petrified Florist, starring Bette Savis and Lester Coward.

Howard had earlier co-starred with Davis in the film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's book Of Human Bondage (1934) and later in the romantic comedy It's Love I'm After (1937) (also co-starring Olivia de Havilland). Howard starred with Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo (1939) and Norma Shearer in a film version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1936).

He is perhaps best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind (1939), but he was uncomfortable with Hollywood and returned to England to help with the World War II effort. He directed and starred in a number of World War II films including 49th Parallel (1941) playing an English eccentric who is wounded while capturing a Nazi, and The First of the Few (1942) (known in the U.S. as Spitfire), a film he also produced.

Death

Howard died in 1943 when he was flying to Bristol, U.K., from Lisbon, Portugal, on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines/BOAC Flight 777. The aircraft, a Douglas DC-3, was shot down by a German Junkers Ju 88 aircraft over the Bay of Biscay.
Although they have been completely discredited, there were rumours that the Germans believed the U.K. Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had been in Algiers, Algeria, 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. 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.

Several exhaustively detailed books such as Bloody Biscay: The Story of the Luftwaffe's Only Long Range Maritime Fighter Unit, V Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 40, and Its Adversaries 1942-1944 (2001 by Chris Goss) by (which comes to a slightly different conclusion), Flight 777 (1957 by Ian Colvin), and In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard (1984 by Ronald Howard, Leslie's son), conclude that the Germans were almost certainly out to shoot down the plane in order to kill Howard himself. 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 (German air-force) attack. Ronald Howard's book, in particular, explores in great detail written German orders to the Ju-88 Staffel (squadron) based in France assigned to intercept the aircraft, as well as communiqués 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 Churchill would be travelling alone aboard an unescorted and unarmed civilian aircraft when both the secrecy and air power of the British government were at his command.
Howard had been 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.)
Ronald Howard was of the conviction that the orders to liquidate Leslie came from Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, 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 was flying 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 Ju-88 Staffel was sent beyond its normal patrol area to intercept and shoot down the aircraft, 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-ranked, government civil servants. There were also two or three children of British military personnel.
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 from Bordeaux, France, and NW from A Coruña, Spain. (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 photographs were sent to Howard's family.
Goss's book, however, quotes Oberleutnant (Senior Lieutenant) Herbert Hintze, Staffel Führer of 14 staffels and based in Bordeaux, 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 U.K., and that had they known, they could easily have escorted the plane to Bordeaux and captured it and all aboard.

A more recent book by Spanish writer José Rey-Ximena, El Vuelo del Ibis (The Flight of the Ibis) claims that Howard was on a top-secret mission for Churchill to dissuade Francisco Franco, Spain's authoritarian dictator and head of state, from joining the Axis powers (i.e., Germany's Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini).Staff writer. . United Press International. October 6, 2008. Accessed May 25, 2009. Howard had contacts with Ricardo Giménez-Arnau, who at the time was a young and very modest diplomat in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs via an old girlfriend, Conchita Montenegro.

Personal life

He was married to Ruth Martin in 1916 and they had two children. His son Ronald Howard (1918-1996) also became an actor and is noted for portraying the title character in a television series Sherlock Holmes (1954) in addition to his biography of his father. Howard's daughter, Leslie Ruth Howard (born 18 October 1924 USA ), also wrote a biography, A Quite Remarkable Father. Their biographies are among the few biographies of Howard.
Arthur Howard, Leslie's younger brother, was also an actor, primarily in British comedies. A sister, Irene Howard, was a costume designer. Another sister, Doris Stainer, founded a small school, Hurst Lodge, in Sunningdale, Berkshire, U.K., and remained its headmistress for some years.

Widely known as a ladies' man, he is reported to have had an affair with Tallulah Bankhead when they appeared on-stage (in the U.K.) in Her Cardboard Lover (1927); Merle Oberon while filming The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934); and Conchita Montenegro, with whom he had appeared in the film Never the Twain Shall Meet (1931).

Howard's will revealed an estate of £62,761 (in 1943 pound sterling).

Filmography