Leslie Howard

Leslie Howard Steiner (3 April 1893 – 1 June 1943) was an English actor, director, producer and writer. 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, including Berkeley Square (1933), Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel (both 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 Second World War 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.

Howard was born Leslie Howard Steiner to a British mother, Lilian (née Blumberg), and a Hungarian Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner, in Forest Hill, London. His younger brother was actor Arthur Howard. Lilian had been raised as a Christian, but she was of partial Jewish ancestry – her paternal grandfather, Ludwig Blumberg, was a Jewish merchant who had married into the English upper-middle classes.

He received his formal education at Alleyn's School, London. Like many others around the time of the First World War, the family anglicised its name, in this case to "Stainer", although Howard's name remained Steiner in official documents, such as his military records.

Howard was a 21-year-old bank clerk in Dulwich when the First World War began; in September 1914, he voluntarily enlisted (under the name Leslie Howard Steiner) as a Private with the British Army's Inns of Court Officer Training Corps in London. In February 1915, he received a commission as a subaltern with the 3/1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry, with which he trained in England until 19 May 1916, when he resigned his commission and was medically discharged from the British Army with neurasthenia.

In March 1920, Howard gave public notice in The London Gazette that he had changed his surname, and would thereafter be known by the name of Howard instead of Steiner.

Howard began his professional acting career in regional tours of the comedy plays Peg o' My Heart and Charley's Aunt in 1916–17 and on the London stage in 1917, but had his greatest theatrical success in the United States in Broadway theatre, in plays such as Aren't We All? (1923), Outward Bound (1924) and The Green Hat (1925). He became an undisputed Broadway star in Her Cardboard Lover (1927).^{[citation needed]}