Leslie Howard (actor)

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Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in Romeo and Juliet (1936)
Memorial plaque for Leslie Howard and other British victims of German aircraft killings in the Serra da Capelada

Leslie Howard Stainer (born April 3, 1893 in London , England , † June 1, 1943 in the Bay of Biscay in a plane down) was a British stage and film actor and director . He was nominated twice for an Oscar for best actor and played the role of Ashley Wilkes in the classic film Gone With the Wind (1939).

Life

Leslie Howard was the son of Hungarian - Jewish parents. After graduating from university, he first worked in banking, but then the First World War broke out. Howard became a soldier and returned seriously wounded in 1917. He started acting as a therapy to relieve war trauma. He then learned the craft of acting at a touring theater. As early as 1920 he made the leap to Broadway , where he played in 17 plays in the 1920s and became a theater star. Later he was also often responsible for his plays as a director and writer.

He made his first film in 1930. Initially under contract with MGM , he shot alongside the studio's top female stars at the beginning of the decade. He was three times in front of the camera at the side of Norma Shearer , for example in The Courage to Happiness and Love Sorrow , and starred alongside Marion Davies in Five and Ten , the film adaptation of the novel by Fannie Hurst . He had other appearances alongside Ann Harding in Animal Kingdom and Kay Francis in British Agent . Howard mainly specialized in disaffected and melancholy characters, often intellectuals or romantics. In England he shot the very successful adventure film Die Scharlachrote Blume (1934) in 1934, in which he saves innocent French people from the guillotine as an English nobleman during the French Revolution. Bette Davis was his partner in three films : In the film drama Of Human Bondage (1934), in the comedy It's Love I'm After (1937) and in The Petrified Forest (1936), the film adaptation of the play of the same name by Robert E. Sherwood . In The Petrified Forest , Howard played a suicidal writer who wanders through the desert as a tramp. At his side, Humphrey Bogart celebrated his breakthrough as a film actor in a supporting role as gangster Duke Mantee, not least thanks to the advocacy of Leslie Howard, who explicitly insisted against the opinion of the film producers that the largely unknown Bogart - who had played the role of the gangster before had played on Broadway - was also cast in the film.

In 1938 Howard celebrated a personal success in England in the literary film adaptation Pygmalion: The novel of a flower girl based on the play of the same name by George Bernard Shaw . Howard co-directed with Anthony Asquith , while Nobel Prize winner Shaw co-wrote the script for the film. Howard impersonated the high-handed linguist and professor Henry Higgins at the side of Wendy Hiller . Howard received his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance . His biggest commercial hit was Gone With the Wind in 1939, in which Howard played the role of Ashley Wilkes. Howard did not want to take on the role, however, because he saw himself as unsuitable for the role and could not gain much from the content of Gone With the Wind . In return, the producer of the film, David O. Selznick , had Howard act as co-producer of his film Intermezzo , in which Ingrid Bergman made her US film debut.

Howard returned to England after the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He participated in numerous entertainment events for the British soldiers on the front lines. The Jewish actor used his popularity and was intensely involved in propaganda campaigns against the Third Reich. Among other things, he was involved in several anti-Nazi films in various functions as a director, producer and actor. On a return flight from Lisbon to London, his civilian aircraft BOAC Flight 777 was shot down by the German Air Force in the Bay of Biscay , killing all 17 passengers. The entrepreneur Wilfrid Israel, who had been expelled from Germany, was also on board . To date, the circumstances of the crash have not been fully clarified and there are various theories as to why the civilian machine was shot down, for example that the German secret service had assumed that Winston Churchill was in the civilian machine. Howard's body was never found.

Howard had been married to Ruth Evelyn Martin from 1916 until his death. They had two children, the future actor Ronald Howard and the daughter Leslie Ruth Howard (1924-2013). His nephew was the British theater and film actor Alan Howard .

Filmography

Awards

Web links

Commons : Leslie Howard  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leslie Howard at Allmovie
  2. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xioy2MeugY
  3. ^ Otto Friedrich : Before the Deluge . 1972, p. 307.
personal data
SURNAME Howard, Leslie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Howard Stainer, Leslie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British stage and film actor
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH June 1, 1943
Place of death Bay of Biscay