Programming Note

[Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind (1939)]

Gone With The Wind to air on TCM Thursday, February 9, at 9:00 PM PST [Please check your local listings]

Real or Imagined?

[Leslie Howard with Archie Mayo
on the set of It's Love I'm After, 1937]

Leslie Howard's son, Ronald "Wink" Howard, talks about his father's shyness:

"As far as living in Hollywood was concerned Leslie had always kept a pretty low profile, not from any innate hostility to the place, but simply because he was not a very social animal. He was rarely seen 'around and

Leslie Howard - His Own Man

[Leslie Howard, c. 1920s]

Roland Pertwee remembers Leslie Howard after his death in a letter to Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard's son:

"I have very tender, soft-edged memories of Leslie who, untouched by success, moved gently through life and always contrived to appear just a scrap out of focus. Unlike the majority of stars in that particular

A Most Unappreciated Man

[Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind, 1939]

Leslie Howard definitely did not want the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind (1939). Howard thought Ashley to be "a dreadful milk-sop, totally spineless and negative." He found the character "unsure and vacillating, uncertain as a moth fluttering between lamps—the done-to instead of the doing man, torn between the opposing polarities of two

BBC Report About Leslie Howard's Death

[BBC Report of Leslie Howard's Death]

On Saturday, July 30, I posted on Facebook the 2014 BBC report on Leslie Howard's Death in which Estel Eforgan (Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor) and Tom Hamilton (Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave A Damn) were interviewed.

I did not post on Monday or Tuesday so that I could devote all my time over the last week to an extensive update to my page: About the Ibis and Its Fateful Flight • Tuesday, June 1, 1943. The page is still not completely finished. I will be adding Estel Eforgan's and Ronald Howard's analyses as time permits. One of the advantages of a blog is that pages can be constantly updated with additional information as it is found and I will be updating the Ibis page until I have found every bit of info I can. I have found conflicting information and some new information that I had not seen before and will be investigating the sources of that information as well.

The page includes information about the plane itself, the shoot down and corresponding newspaper articles, the theories about why the plane was targeted, and the passengers and crew. It contains pictures of the plane, the airfield in Portela and the monument at Cadeira, Spain.

I hope that you will take the time to read it and draw your own conclusions.

• Eforgan, Estel. Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor. London: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2010. ISBN 978-0-85303-941-9.
• Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard. London: St. Martin's Press, 1984. ISBN 0-312-41161-8.
• Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave A Damn at the Internet Movie Database
• Leslie Howard The Man Who Gave A Damn Website

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The "Phoney" War

[Leslie Howard by Fred Daniels,
National Portrait Gallery, c. 1942]

In the early days of WWII, Leslie Howard didn't have much to do. Even though Great Britain had declared war on Germany in early September, 1939, no real fighting began for months. Hitler was too busy invading and vanquishing Poland. Howard had planned to begin filming The Man Who Lost Himself as soon as he arrived in England in August, but due to

Trivial Fond Records, Concluded

[Leslie Howard and his son, Ronald, at
their home, Stowe Maries, c. 1938]

Over the last two days I have been sharing Ronald Howard's "Hamlet" letters to his father. Those letters were written when Ronald had come to believe that his father had been murdered by the Germans. Howard had also finally accepted the fact that he would never know who ordered the shoot down of his father's civilian plane. Ronald had tried so