Leslie Howard
My main objection to those who clamour for more gay roles is that it implies that actors cannot do the very thing they do best i.e. assume roles.
Many had to act as a way out of their upbringing often quite different to their film image.
Sean Connery was no privileged Etonian but an Edinburgh milkman; Bernard Miles, a noted rustic on screen, never lived further out of London than Chiswick; stage cockney Sid James was South African.
Yesterday I watched a recording of SKY ARTS appreciation of Leslie Howard.
The definitive English gentleman of Hollywood was the son of a Hungarian Jew brought up not on some landed estate but in South London educated at Dulwich.
His early career between the wars was in the theatre and he was popular on Broadway.
One successful production was The Petrified Forest in which Humphrey Bogart played a criminal on the run Duke Mantee and Howard a disillusioned journalist fancied by waitress Bette Davis who rather incongruously had played a cockney waitress in the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage in which Howard played the lead role.
When it was decided that Hollywood should make a film of The Petrified Forest, Howard insisted that Bogey, his film career stalling, should maintain the role.
He was forever grateful and and named his son (by Lauren Bacall) Leslie Howard Bogart.
Howard is best known not for playing the English gentleman but the courtly Southerner Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind.
Now at the top of his game and of Hollywood he returned to England for the war to make such patriotic films as Pimpernel Smith and The First of the Few, the biopic of Reg Mitchell who designed the Spitfire.
Typically Howard was concerned that his gracious portrayal of a man who was a swearing cockney might offend the family so he invited them all on set.
Henry Elkins wrote recently that Britain out-thought and out-performed the Nazis as the war progressed.
Although Goebbels was a massive film buff the German patriotic film effort was frankly pathetic – one made on the Titanic was high budget but low quality – whereas I still watch Leslie Howard’s films with pride and admiration.
Sadly these were to cost him his life as on a flight back from Lisbon in 1943, where he was probably on espionage duty for his country, his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe.
The ultimate gentleman made the ultimate sacrifice.
