Leslie Howard (British actor)

Leslie Howard
Howard as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939)
Born	Leslie Howard Steiner (1893-04-03)3 April 1893 Forest Hill, London, England
Died	1 June 1943(1943-06-01) (aged 50) At sea in the Bay of Biscay
Occupation	Actor, director, producer
Years active	1916–1942
Spouse(s)	Ruth Evelyn Martin (1916–1943; his death; 2 children)
Partner(s)	Conchita Montenegro
Children	Ronald Howard (1918–1996) Leslie Ruth Howard (1924–2013)

Leslie Howard (born Leslie Howard Steiner, 3 April 1893 – 1 June 1943) was an English stage and film actor, director and producer. Howard also wrote many stories and articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Howard was one of the biggest box-office draws and movie idols of the 1930s but is probably best remembered for playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939). Howard had movie roles in many other notable films, including: Berkeley Square (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), The Petrified Forest (1936), Pygmalion (1938), Intermezzo (1939), "Pimpernel" Smith (1941) and The First of the Few (1942), receiving two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Howard's Second World War activities included acting and filmmaking. He was active in anti-German propaganda and rumoured to have been involved with British or Allied Intelligence, sparking conspiracy theories regarding his death in 1943 at the hands of the German Luftwaffe when the British airliner on which he was a passenger was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.

Howard was born Leslie Howard Steiner to a British mother, Lilian (née Blumberg), and a Hungarian Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner, in Forest Hill, London. Lilian had been brought up as a Christian, but she was of partial Jewish ancestry—her paternal grandfather Ludwig Blumberg, a Jewish merchant originally from East Prussia, had married into the English upper middle classes. Howard was educated 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," though Howard's legal name remained Steiner as evidenced by his military records and the public notice of his name change in 1920. He worked as a bank clerk before at the outbreak of the Great War. He served in the British Army as a subaltern in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry but suffered shell shock, which led to his relinquishing his commission in 1916.