“I would be satisfied to show my pictures in ten or twelve selected cities, and find ample audience for the things I could do without shame. It is a very good thing to make up your mind about whom you are going to please. One cannot hope to appeal to everyone who attends the film theatres, that is obvious insanity. I prefer to please those who think along the same line as I do….Naturally, it is a limited field.” – Leslie Howard
Source: Ruth Rankin (1936)
Photo: Edward Steichen (1932)
“I suppose you want to know where I was born. Well, I never was born.” — Leslie Howard
Source: 1930
Photo: Edward Steichen
“The truth is that to enjoy acting one must be an exhibitionist at heart, one must revel in those exposures of the emotions which would be agonizing to a shy or reserved person. All the great actors have been and are exhibitionists. It is easy and pleasurable for them to shout, to weep, to tear their hair, to laugh, to make love. They enjoy it and they make their audience enjoy it. They are the ideal actors.
“As a boy the possibility of being an actor never even occurred to me. Nor could it have occurred to anybody who knew the shy and inarticulate youth that I was. I wanted to write. I felt I could express myself on paper; alone in a room I felt articulate and creative. But I was also lazy, a thing a writer never dare be.
“Application is, I am convinced, the first rule for authors. Then, mysteriously, a part in a play offered itself – at time when to earn a living was a prime motive of existence. And then another part in another play. And gradually the miracle took place. The metamorphosis of a nervous, inhibited, agoraphobic individual who had other ambitions altogether into a quite successful actor.” – Leslie Howard
With Clark Gable and Gable’s wife at the time Maria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham.
“I am a tremendous believer in the power of broadcasting. … I don’t believe anything is too good for the public. … In my own experience I have proved that the cinema public is as ready to patronize the work of Bernard Shaw, the music of William Walton and film technique at its most subtle.” — Leslie Howard
“What the actor is in private life, he is to a large extent on the stage, because he cannot conceal himself and his true personality from his audience.” – Leslie Howard
Mister V, aka ‘Pimpernel’ Smith (1941)
