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

Leslie Howard Clairvoyant, Or Just Good Businessman?

[Leslie Howard, c. 1920]

Excerpt from my Leslie Howard Biography:

Based on Leslie Howard's later success in managing his career, he would have made a fine businessman. Howard had the foresight to give up lucrative salaries as actor and instead take minimum wage to become co-producer in many of the plays in which he appeared—co-producer with half the profits and movie rights for any play that sold, and in those days, most of the talking pictures were just transplanted plays from Broadway.(3) But the idea of life as a businessman stuck at a desk in a dreary office seemed tedious and dull to Howard, and he still held firm to his dream of becoming a writer.


(3) Fletcher, Adele Whitely. "Love In The Life Of Leslie Howard." Modern Screen, October, 1933. Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated, New Jersey.

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Programming Note

[Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland in It's Love I'm After, 1937]

It's Love I'm After to air on TCM this Sunday, August 21, 7:30 AM EST, 4:30 AM PST [Please check your local listings]

If you missed the chance last month to see Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in this 1937 "rippling farce, brightly written and deftly directed," you have another chance this Sunday. It's Bette Davis Day on TCM.

Says Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times review of 11 November 1937: "Mr. Howard's Basil Underwood is a gem of conceit, self-delusion and calculated posturing, but he shyly confesses in every bit of character shading that there is a very human chap beneath the veneer." "This [farce] spins delightfully." "Mr. Howard and Miss Davis must give us other farces and Archie Mayo must direct them again. It's good to find a comedy with people in it instead of whimsies."

In the vernacular of today—It's funny! It's a delight! Watch it!

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Have You Missed Me?

[Leslie Howard, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library, c. 1920]

Hopefully, you all have missed my posts over the last several days. I have been diligently working on the "Leslie Howard Biography" section of my blog and haven't taken the time to write any daily posts.

It is a painstaking process of taking the pieces of various books, newspaper and magazine articles, and online sources, and figuring out how they fit together. For some reason, writers don't always put dates in their pieces. I have never been able to figure out why. Also, a story may appear in one source and not in another, which requires me to find a verification source. This, too, can be difficult if the second source got their information from the first source. And some of the stories, or episodes, of Leslie Howard's life vary. I assume this is because the author has a particular point of view they want to put across. Separating fact from opinion takes time as well. I hope at the end to have one coherent biography and also a chronology of Leslie Howard's life.

I would like to solidly complete "The London Theatre Years - 1916 to 1920" before I continue my daily posts. This should be within a day or two. Please bear with me.

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Holy Hollywood

[Leslie Howard by Vandamm Studio, 1932]

By 1927 Leslie Howard had been working in New York on the Broadway stage for seven years. He had appeared in seventeen plays there and many others in his native England going back to the start of his professional career in 1916. Howard had even authored and directed some of his own productions. He was well-known in New York.

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

William Gargan - This post is dedicated to Leslie Gargan

[Leslie Howard with good friend Bill Gargan, along
with Fred MacMurray, W. C. Fields and George Arliss]

In William Gargan's book, Why Me? An Autobiography, Gargan enjoys recounting his memories of times spent with his good friend, Leslie Howard. One of the traits Gargan found amusing about Howard was his "frugality." This trait in Howard was also noted by Howard's daughter, Leslie Ruth, in her book, A Quite Remarkable Father. Leslie Ruth tells a

Love Wins In The End

[Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer taking a stroll in between takes
on the MGM lot where they were filming Smilin' Through, 1932]

Smilin' Through is the story of Sir John Carteret (Leslie Howard), a man who suffers a life-long feeling of loss and loneliness after losing his bride, Moonyeen Clare (Norma Shearer), at the very moment they are to share their wedding vows. Their mutual friend, Jeremy Wayne (Fredric March), shows up at the church to kill Carteret out of jealousy because

Leslie Howard Begins His Love of Horses

[Leslie Howard]

Leslie Howard had a very active imagination and used it to begin writing plays and stories at a young age. He wrote his first play, in Latin, by the time he was 13 years old. Young Leslie's drama was presented at the Christmas pageant at his school. His mother encouraged her son, but his

Progamming Note

[Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland and
Bette Davis in It's Love I'm After, 1937]

It's Love I'm After to air on TCM on Sunday, August 21, at 4:30 AM PST [Please check your local listings]

Produced by Warner Brothers and directed by Archie Mayo, It's Love I'm After is a comedy which brings together Leslie Howard and Bette Davis for the third time. They appeared together previously in Of Human Bondage (1934) and The Petrified Forest (1936).

The film is about a pair of egotistical actors (Howard and Davis) who are in love but who have delayed their marriage over and over again throughout the years, mainly due to their heated arguments off stage. But the two finally agree that tonight is the night, until a young heiress (Olivia de Havilland) shows up and becomes totally infatuated with Leslie Howard. (I know that feeling.) Her fiancé (Henry Grant) pleads with Howard to discourage de Havilland and the wedding is delayed once again as Howard barges in at de Havilland's country home to show her just how obnoxious he can be.

The movie received good reviews and classic movie reviewers have come to recognize the film as undervalued and neglected.

I Love My Husband, But—

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish
in Berkeley Square, 1933

Norma Shearer, in an article "I love my husband, but—" for Modern Screen, June 1935, describes Leslie Howard:

"There was Leslie Howard . . . Leslie, true spiritual, who can wear the lace frills and bend the knee with such grace and conviction. Leslie with those amazing blue eyes that so 

Her Cardboard Lover

[Leslie Howard and Jeanne Eagels
in Her Cardboard Lover]

In early 1927 Leslie Howard began rehearsals for Her Cardboard Lover which was to open at the Empire Theatre in NYC on 21 March 1927. Howard's part was André Sallicel, a "romantic and penniless young ass who falls desperately in love with a wealthy woman from Paris." Howard was not the star of the show, he didn't even receive billing. The star

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

The Fighting Democrat

[Leslie Howard and J.B. Priestly on Britain Speaks, 1940]

It was the end of January 1941. Leslie Howard had been at home in England since August 1939. Great Britain had been at war with Germany for approximately sixteen months. Howard had been appearing on J.B. Priestly's BBC radio program Britain Speaks, or "Britain Pleads" as some called it, since July 1940 pleading with America to enter WWII on the side of the Allies.

Within the previous week, Howard had heard what would come to be known as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "The Four Freedoms" speech

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

Trivial Fond Records, Continued

[Leslie Howard with his son, Ronald, at
the Hotel Carlyle in New York, 1935]

Ronald Howard states in Trivial Fond Records, a book containing the writings of his father, Leslie Howard, that he wrote a series of poems in a "sense of protest" immediately after learning of his father's death. However, after the younger Howard understood what his father must have gone through in the minutes before his death, he wrote another

Trivial Fond Records

[Leslie Howard with his son Ronald
on one of their many crossings]

I have recently been reading transcripts of Leslie Howard's WWII radio broadcasts transmitted from England to the United States asking the U.S. to enter the war in support of the Allies. I will be sharing his thoughts this week.

But first I would like to give you this poem Howard's son, Ronald, wrote to his father on the occasion of his father's death. Ronald Howard was

Never The Twain Shall Meet

[Leslie Howard and Conchita Montenegro
in Never the Twain Shall Meet, 1931]

[For those following my blog by email, this is my only scheduled post for the week and will be posted to Facebook in sections.]

The next Leslie Howard film to be shown on TCM (Monday, July 25, 11:00am PST) will be the 1931 MGM remake of Never the Twain Shall Meet with Conchita Montenegro. The Peter B. Kyne novel of the same

Remembering Billie Holliday

Born Eleanora Fagan (7 April 1915 to 17 July 1959), Billie Holiday, Lady Day, had a 30-year career writing and performing music. Holiday wowed audiences with her vocal style and tempo. She drew audiences to her with her warmth and wit. Holiday was a musical genius. No one will ever match the influence she had in her field. Listening to her music as often as I do, the only difference today is remembering that this is the anniversary of her death.

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