The Theatre

Regarding Leslie Howard's disparaging remarks to the press about the play (The Green Hat) in which he was appearing:

"It is doubtful that these frank utterances can have been greeted with any pleasure by the management. To have Broadway's most successful play cried down by a member of its cast must have been as refreshing as falling into a lake in November, and the reaction of Michael Arlen can only have bordered on the choleric. But it did not seem to worry Leslie at all. He went on nodding and smiling sweetly at everybody, apparently blissfully unaware that he was persona non grata with his employers. This was the first statement to the press he had ever made, and he must have considered it successful, for he made similar remarks with commendable honesty but doubtful tact for the rest of his life. He got great pleasure out of potting at idols. This, as was to be expected, had a shocking effect on the idols, for he was the last person they suspected of such infamy." A Quite Remarkable Father, pg. 107

"Leslie was always permanently gloomy about leaving home—or travelling at all which he hated—and he frequently referred to 'the awful annual exodus' to which he had to submit himself to earn a living. And he, equally, talked of being bored, as other actors did, with long runs. At the same time, he was quite well paid for his boredom. Certainly his first ten years as an actor had been a hard slog, and he was in and out of plays with, at times, sickening regularity, sometimes two or three a year. He then complained when they didn't run, and, later when they did, became bored with their constant repetition. That was where writers, he felt, had it all over actors: they didn't go on repeating the same lines, they wrote different ones. And directors preserved their sanity by directing different plays." In Search of My Father, pg. 36

"He often said in moments of infuriation, or even exasperated amusement at his predicament, that acting was a silly, futile, bogus sort of job and actors no more than clever performing seals, or, at worst, mere puppets jerked into life at another's bidding. In a more serious moment he would say they were too often at the mercy of unscrupulous, completely inartistic people who were simply in the business for the money—and it was they, the actors, who had to stand up and be counted when bad plays, put on by inept managements, got a critical pasting." In Search of My Father, pg. 38

"In such moments of depression, in the middle of a long run, even reasonably good plays lost their flavour and Leslie found it difficult to remain convinced, or convincing. In such a mood, he saw the whole business of acting as a sheer process of embarrassment, with its sheepish daubing on of grease-paint followed by a period of immodest prancing about in borrowed finery. It was supposedly sophisticated, yet somehow almost primitive and barbaric. What was this nightly spectacle of oneself but playing at pretences, the whole imitation of life as it was not—simply to take other people's minds off their problems? Though excusable in the very young it was, to say the least, lamentable in those approaching middle age. Now, Leslie realised this kind of provocation would probably be taken as a kind of wry Howard joke when perhaps he was a little under the weather, and people thought he was being sarcastically amusing and didn't believe a word of it. What most didn't realise was that his disenchantment with acting was, at heart an instinctive reaction against the theatre, as it was then constituted, which he felt was a place of total unreality, a veritable cock-pit of contrivance." In Search of My Father, pg. 38

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