During the 1930s, Leslie Howard--our Star of the Month for June--was Hollywood's quintessential British leading man. Tall, tweedy and beautifully spoken, Howard had a touch of a poet in his persona. (He also played a poet in one of his best vehicles, 1936's The Petrified Forest). His face captured the look perfectly with its wistful eyes, shy half-smile and the high forehead of an intellectual.

Female audiences of the day seemed captivated by Howard's gentle charm, which helped explain his casting in Gone with the Wind (1939) as the man Vivien Leigh preferred over the infinitely more robust and virile Clark Gable. Because the somewhat morose Ashley Wilkes is the character for which Howard is now best remembered, it is sometimes forgotten that he was quite deft in comedy. Howard's Henry Higgins in the 1938 film version of Pygmalion was considered definitive--at least until Rex Harrison came along in My Fair Lady.

Our comprehensive tribute to Howard's all-too-brief career includes 20 of his movie vehicles, ranging from his first American film, 1930's Outward Bound, to his final movie, Spitfire (1942), released in the U.S. just days after his death in 1943. His life was tragically cut short at age 50, when his plane was shot down during World War II.

Also included in our Howard screenings is Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn (2016, TCM premiere), an intimate documentary about Howard's life directed by Thomas Hamilton. This film includes once-lost home movies, both color and black and white, from the Howard family.

Leslie Howard Steiner was born in the Crystal Palace area of South London, England on April 3, 1893. (His surname, which he would legally drop in 1920, was at times Anglicized to "Stainer.") His father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and his mother was an Englishwoman of partial German Jewish ancestry. Howard was the oldest of five siblings. A brother, Arthur, also became an actor; and a sister, Irene, was a costume designer and casting director.

Young Howard was educated in London at Alleyn's School and Dulwich College and later worked as a bank clerk. His mother loved the theater and encouraged her son's interest in acting from an early age. In 1914, he made his film debut in a silent short called "The Heroine of Mons," although any dreams of a movie career were postponed by the outbreak of World War I. Howard enlisted in the British Army but in 1916, suffering from shell-shock, left the service and returned home.

After his mother encouraged him to resume acting as therapy, he made a handful of other silent films and began acting onstage in regional tours before making his London stage debut in 1917. Leading roles in the English theater led to him relocating to the United States in the early 1920s. Howard found further success on the New York stage in such plays as Aren't We All? (1923), Outward Bound (1924), The Green Hat (1925) and Escape (1927).

In addition to acting, he also worked on Broadway as a producer, director and writer, starring in his own script Murray Hill (1927). His claim to major Broadway stardom was solidified by roles as the paramour of Jeanne Eagels in Her Cardboard Lover (1927) and the intrepid time traveler of Berkeley Square (1929). In London in 1928, he starred again in Her Cardboard Lover, this time opposite Tallulah Bankhead.

Howard's U.S. movie debut, and his first talkie, was the film version of Outward Bound (1930), the Sutton Vane play he had performed on Broadway. In the stage version of this allegory of a mysterious ship headed for an uncertain destination, Howard had played the suicidal young lover, Henry. In the film he takes on the role of prodigal son Tom, played on Broadway by Alfred Lunt.

In 1931, Howard appeared in three provocative pre-Code films for MGM: the comic romance Never the Twain Shall Meet, costarring Conchita Montenegro; and the dramas Five and Ten, costarring Marion Davies and A Free Soul, starring Norma Shearer. The last film is of particular interest because it brought Lionel Barrymore a Best Actor Oscar for his role as Shearer's father, and costarred Howard's future Gone with the Wind rival Clark Gable. Also in 1931, Howard filmed Devotion at RKO, playing an attorney whose housekeeper (Ann Harding) is secretly in love with him.

At the time, Howard complained about his overly busy schedule and the "effeminacy" of acting. But he remained an in-demand Hollywood leading man, reteaming at MGM with Norma Shearer in the melodrama Smilin' Through (1932) and at RKO with Ann Harding in the film version of Philip Barry's stage comedy The Animal Kingdom (1932), which Howard had previously performed with great success on Broadway.

For United Artists, Howard shot the Western drama Secrets (1933) opposite Mary Pickford. Warner Bros.' Captured! (1933), a World War I drama set in a German prison camp, stars Howard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as prisoners. Howard's first of two Oscar® nominations as Best Actor came for Berkeley Square (1933), in which he reprised his stage role of Peter Standish, the young American who is transported back in time to London during the American Revolution.

Howard is well-cast in the central role of a sensitive medical student in RKO's adaptation of the Somerset Maugham story Of Human Bondage (1934), if somewhat overwhelmed by the aggressive performance of Bette Davis as the shrewish waitress who torments him. Howard had the title role in British Agent (1934), playing a diplomat in 1917 Russia who tries to prevent the Bolsheviks from signing a separate treaty with Germany.

A quintessential Howard role came in UA's adaptation of the classic novel The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), in which he plays a foppish Londoner who uses a secret identity and a variety of disguises to save the lives of innocent victims of the French Revolution.

Howard captured another famed Broadway performance on film with The Petrified Forest (1936), the Robert E. Sherwood play in which he had played the self-sacrificing hero to Humphrey Bogart's menacing villain. A more subdued Bette Davis costars. Bogart was so grateful for Howard's insistence that he repeat his stage performance on film that he named his daughter Leslie Howard Bogart in honor of his fellow actor.

Warner Bros.' It's Love I'm After (1937) teamed Howard and Bette Davis for a third time in this romantic comedy about an embattled theatrical couple. The film also introduced Howard to a costar, Olivia de Havilland, who would soon play a significant role as his devoted wife in Gone with the Wind.

Howard's second of two Oscar® nominations as Best Actor came for his polished interpretation of Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1938). The British production was co-directed by Howard and Anthony Asquith and costarred Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle. Howard then played opposite Ingrid Bergman in her American film debut, the gentle romance Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939). Next came the powerhouse film for which Howard remains most famous: Gone with the Wind (1939), the Civil War epic in which he plays the soulful Ashley Wilkes. According to all reports, he despised the role and took pride in never having read the Margaret Mitchell novel. Barely bothering to alter his English accent, he plays this Southern gentleman with the requisite soulfulness but delivers the least compelling performance of the movie's four leads.

With the advent of World War II, Howard was eager to return home to England and help with the war effort. He became a major figure in the country's propaganda efforts. For the powerful British film 49th Parallel (1941), he joined other top talent including Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey in a story about a Nazi U-boat that is sunk off the Canadian coast. The film won an Oscar® for Best Story.

Howard's final film as an actor was another one with great propaganda value: Spitfire (1942), which was called The First of the Few in England. He produced and directed in addition to taking on the leading role of R.J. Mitchell, the real-life designer of the Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft, crucial to British air battles in WWII. Howard provided direction and narration for another patriotic film, The Gentle Sex (1943), about young British women helping with the war effort.

Howard's fatal flight occurred on June 1, 1943, after he boarded a civilian DC-3 headed for Bristol, England from Lisbon, Portugal, where he had been acting as a British "cultural ambassador." A squadron of German bombers shot down the plane over the Bay of Biscay. Mystery has surrounded the incident, with some believing that the Luftwaffe had targeted the plane because they erroneously believed Winston Churchill was also aboard. By this time Howard was deeply loved and revered by his fellow Englishmen, not only as a theatrical personality but as a dedicated patriot. Film historian David Shipman wrote that "No figure in British show business was so deeply mourned, or missed, during the [20th] century."

Howard had wed Ruth Evelyn Martin in 1916 and they remained married until his death in 1943. They had two children: Ronald (who became an actor) and Leslie Ruth. It was widely acknowledged that Howard's secretary, Violette Cunnington, was his mistress. Cunnington died (in her early 30s) in 1942, just months before Howard's death. Known as a ladies' man who effortlessly attracted the opposite sex, Howard once remarked that "I didn't chase women, but I couldn't always be bothered to run away."

by Roger Fristoe