Leslie Howard

Biography

Leslie Howard Steiner (3 April 1893 – 1 June 1943) was an English actor, director and producer. He wrote many stories and articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and was one of the biggest box-office draws and movie idols of the 1930s. Active in both Britain and Hollywood, Howard played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939). He had roles in many other films, often playing the quintessential Englishman, including Berkeley Square (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), The Petrified Forest (1936), Pygmalion (1938), Intermezzo (1939), "Pimpernel" Smith (1941), and The First of the Few (1942). He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Berkeley Square and Pygmalion. Howard's World War II activities included acting and filmmaking. He helped to make anti-German propaganda and shore up support for the Allies—two years after his death the British Film Yearbook described Howard's work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda". He was rumoured to have been involved with British or Allied Intelligence, sparking conspiracy theories regarding his death in 1943 when the Luftwaffe shot down BOAC Flight 777 over the Atlantic (off the coast of Cedeira, A Coruña), on which he was a passenger. Description above from the Wikipedia article Leslie Howard, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Most Known For

Gone with the Wind

as Ashley Wilkes

MGM Parade

49th Parallel

as Philip Armstrong Scott

British Agent

as Stephen 'Steve' Locke

Glorious Technicolor

as Self (archive footage) (uncredited)

Of Human Bondage

as Philip Carey

The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind

as Self (archive footage)

The Gentle Sex

as Narrator (voice)

Pygmalion

as Henry Higgins

The Petrified Forest

as Alan Squier

The First of the Few

as R.J. Mitchell

In Which We Serve

as Narrator (voice) (uncredited)

Romeo and Juliet

as Romeo

The Scarlet Pimpernel

as Sir Percy Blakeney / The Scarlet Pimpernel

The Animal Kingdom

as Tom Collier

A Free Soul

as Dwight Winthrop

Why Be Good?: Sexuality & Censorship in Early Cinema

as Self (archive footage)

"Pimpernel" Smith

as Professor Horatio Smith

Breakdowns of 1936

as Self

Secrets

as John Carlton