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Leslie Howard: Ashley Wilkes
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Leslie Howard (April 3, 1893 - June 1, 1943) was an English stage and Academy Award nominated film actor. He is best known by international audiences as Ashley Wilkes in the movie Gone with the Wind. He was an accomplished actor whose film roles included Professor Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1938), The Petrified Forest (1936) and Intermezzo (1939).
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The year the Second World War broke out, Howard played his most famous role, as the archetypal Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind (US, 1939). He could easily have stayed in Hollywood for the duration, but he was one of the first British stars to make a point of returning home (he actually did this a few days before war broke out, realising that it was inevitable). The rest of his career was spent helping the war effort, both through overt propaganda (From The Four Corners, 1941, shows him escorting Australian, Canadian and New Zealand soldiers to the dome of St Paul's to give them a panoramic view of and lecture about what they were fighting to preserve) and fiction features designed to convey a similar message. His first film as solo director, 'Pimpernel' Smith (1941), wittily updated his most famous British role to a WWII scenario, with his Professor Horatio Smith performing similarly daring rescues of key Allied scientists and humanitarians from Nazi clutches. The same year, he played the explorer Philip Armstrong Scott in the Ministry of Information-backed 49th Parallel (d. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) in a neat inversion of his real-life persona: Scott has selfishly detached himself from his fellow countrymen's concerns by retreating to Canada and refusing to recognise the Nazi threat until his own possessions are brought into the equation.
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It was popularized as a first name by Hungarian-born English actor Leslie Howard (1890-1943). As Ashley Wilkes in the 1939 film version of Gone With the Wind, Howard succeeded in popularizing both his personal name and his character's name.
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It was Howard who insisted that Humphrey Bogart get the role of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), a role Humphrey Bogart had played in the stage production. As he became more successful, he ... became quite picky about which roles he would do and usually performed in but two films per year. In 1939, he played the character that will always be associated with him, that of Ashley Wilkes, the honour-bound disillusioned intellectual Southern gentleman in Gone with the Wind (1939). However, war clouds were gathering over England and he devoted all his energy on behalf of the war effort. He directed films, wrote articles and made radio broadcasts. He died in 1943, when the KLM plane he was in was shot down by German fighters over the Bay of Biscay.
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Howard is perhaps best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in the epic Gone with the Wind (1939), but he was uncomfortable with Hollywood and returned to Britain to help with the World War II war effort. He directed and starred in a number of World War II films, including The First of the Few (which he ... produced and directed) and Forty-Ninth Parallel with Laurence Olivier.
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In 1939, Howard landed the unforgettable role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. He then returned to England to direct and star in several propaganda films relating to World War II, including The First of the Few (1942), Pimpernel Smith (1941), and Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941).
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