Essays
The quintessential Englishman: Leslie Howard and English virtues
Leslie Howard was arguably the cinema’s ideal Englishman. His on screen qualities - of sensitivity, honesty, gentility and integrity - struck a chord with cinema audiences and turned him into a hugely popular performer, on stage and screen. His cinematic persona could be that of the romantic idealist, such as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, or the heroic man of action, as in Scarlet Pimpernel. Leslie Howard had a wistful face and a haunting voice which was used to great effect in his films. But his qualities went beyond acting, for he was also an author, a radio broadcaster, director and producer.
Great actors often make great patriots and Howard was no exception. It was said that after Churchill and Priestley, Howard was one of the most important English voices of the war. He made numerous uplifting patriotic movies, either as actor, director or producer; in his BBC broadcasts to the United States and the Empire, he condemned Nazism and defended democracy and western values; finally, at the request of the British government, he undertook a hazardous journey to Spain and Portugal which would lead to his premature and tragic death. He could not explain the ‘mystery of the call that comes to people from the land of their birth’ but there was little doubt that he felt that call and acted on it with great dignity. After his death in 1943, The Observer’s film critic, C A Lejeune, said that Howard had become ‘a symbol of England, standing for all that is most deeply rooted in the British character.’ His passion for the English idea, she wrote, was ‘almost Shakespearian.’
Leslie Howard Steiner was born in London April 3, 1893, to a young Jewish couple, one of whom (father) was of Hungarian descent. Despite above average intelligence, the short, skinny Leslie was not particularly studious and escaped his unhappiness at school through writing. In grade school he wrote his first play and by the age of 14, he and two family friends were producing their own musical comedies. Howard’s father did not share his wife’s enthusiasm for the arts, and insisted Leslie become a bank clerk.
Howard detested the job and sensed his chance to escape this bondage when war broke out in 1914. The enthusiastic 21-year-old volunteered for service in the British cavalry, even though he had never ridden a horse. In 1914 he found time to appear in a short film ‘The Heroine of Mons.’ In January 1915 Leslie was transported to the fighting front where his romantic notions of war quickly vanished. A second lieutenant in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, he was returned to England in 1916, possibly with shell shock. Shortly after his return, the traumatized ex-soldier met 21-year-old Ruth Martin, a rather plump brunette whom he married the same year.
In the 1920s he had a distinguished career as a stage and movie actor but was lured to Hollywood’s sound revolution by highly lucrative film offers and promises of creative control. After making his debut performance in 1930 in Outward Bound, he starred alongside some of Hollywood’s greatest stars. He appeared opposite Norma Shearer in A Free Soul, Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage, Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo and Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest. Most of his classic roles featured thinking men and intellectuals, something that may at first hand seem very un-English. After all, there is a long tradition in English culture of distrusting intellectuals as ‘too clever by half,’ preferring instead the bluff common sense earthiness of practical folk. The trick was to make them likeable by romanticizing them or turning them into heroic men of action. This characteristic shines through in many roles he played in the 1930s: as Professor Higgins in the 1938 adaptation of Pygmalion; as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind; as the poet held prisoner by Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest, and as the sensitive hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel. With his superb speaking voice, he also took on Shakespearean comedy by co-starring with Norma Shearer in George Cukor’s production of Romeo and Juliet. He may have looked a little old for the part but there was no doubting his usual sensitivity.
During the war Howard made essential contributions to both cinema and country. In 49th Parallel, in which a group of Nazis invade mainland Canada, Howard plays a genteel, carefree upper class aesthete who travels to Canada to study the Red Indians. He is the typical Englishman who wants a quiet life to pursue hobbies, culture and simple habits. Towards the end of the film, the Nazis come across Howard in his remote hideaway. They perceive his love of high culture as decadent and set about destroying some of his treasured paintings. But once again, Howard is no distant intellectual but a thinking man turned hero. At the end of the film, he risks his own life to chase the Nazi vandals through the forest before dispatching them with true venom.
This quality of turning the intellectual into a heroic man of action comes through in Pimpernel Smith (1941). Here Howard plays a Cambridge professor who uses archaeology as a cover for rescuing intellectuals and artists from Nazi Germany. Throughout the film, he delights in outwitting several Nazis, using the irony and understatement so typical of English humour, to baffle his enemies. At the end of the film, Smith manages to evade his captors by vanishing, quite literally, in a cloud of smoke. The villainous Nazis are no march for a civilized cultured Englishman. In The First of the Few, Howard played Spitfire designer R J Mitchell and co-starred with David Niven, another quintessential English gentleman. The film was a tribute to the Battle of Britain pilots but also the integrity and perseverance of Mitchell, played with typical sensitivity by Howard.
Goebbels was said to be enraged by the anti Nazi message of Howard’s films, so much so that the Nazis plotted his death. Indeed, Howard’s death in 1943 became a source of great intrigue. He died when the British Overseas Airways plane he was travelling in was shot down by German fighters over the Bay of Biscayne. The legend persisted for some time that Mr. Howard probably knew that the plane would never make it to Lisbon; it had been sent as a decoy and Churchill was said to be on it. However, a double was on Howard’s plane, while Churchill was traveling on another one. Later, in a biography of his father, “In Search of My Father,” Ronald Howard said he doubted the story of the decoy.
Leslie Howard certainly had some connections with British intelligence, and his lecture tour of Spain and Portugal, from which he was returning on the fatal airplane, may have been a cover for some important spying activities. It was the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who had induced Leslie Howard to undertake the tour of Spain and Portugal.
Leslie Howard was both a fine actor and a true English patriot who served his country at a time of unprecedented peril. In life, as in art, he displayed integrity, honesty and a sense of duty - the true marks of an English gentleman. Sadly, these virtues do not resonate so much today, especially with a younger generation who are more used to brutal, sadistic and foul mouthed screen heroes. We need a return to the old fashioned virtues of duty and chivalry and our film heroes should reflect these values. Instead of mindless celluloid thuggery, we need more virtuous men of action roused to fury by injustice, or perhaps romantic intellectual day dreamers who add to the gaiety of life. Either way, we need more film gurus inspired by Howard’s way.
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