page_title: Leslie Howard
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Leslie Howard / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue plaque erected in 2013 by English Heritage at 45 Farquhar Road, Upper Norwood, London SE19 1SS, London Borough of Southwark
context_page_description: Leslie Howard Steiner was an English actor and film maker. He also 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 is probably best remembered for playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. He had roles in many other notable films, often playing the quintessential Englishman, including Berkeley Square, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Petrified Forest, Pygmalion, Intermezzo, "Pimpernel" Smith, and The First of the Few. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Berkeley Square and Pygmalion.
  Howard's World War II activities included acting and filmmaking. He was active in anti-German propaganda and shoring 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, on which he was a passenger.
context_section_description: Howard was born Leslie Howard Steiner to a British mother, Lilian (née Blumberg), and a Hungarian-Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner, in Upper Norwood, 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.
  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.
  He was a 21-year-old bank clerk in Dulwich when the First World War broke out; 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 Regiment, 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 by deed poll he had abandoned the use of the name Steiner and thereafter would be known by the name of Howard instead.
caption: English Heritage blue plaque at 45 Farquhar Road, Upper Norwood, London
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