Leslie Howard (actor) - Personal Life

Personal Life

Howard married Ruth Martin in 1916 and they had two children. His son Ronald Howard (1918–1996) became an actor and is noted for portraying the title character in a television series Sherlock Holmes (1954).

Arthur, Howard's younger brother, was also an actor, primarily in British comedies. A sister, Irene, was a costume designer. Another sister, Doris Stainer, founded a small school, Hurst Lodge, in Sunningdale, Berkshire, UK, and remained its headmistress for some years.

Widely known as a ladies' man (he himself once said that he "didn't chase women but … couldn't always be bothered to run away"). Howard is reported to have had an affair with Tallulah Bankhead when they appeared on stage (in the UK) in Her Cardboard Lover (1927); Merle Oberon, while filming The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) and Conchita Montenegro, with whom he had appeared in the film Never the Twain Shall Meet (1931). However, towards the end of his life, with the full knowledge of his wife, he did take a mistress, Violette Cunnington. The actress who appeared under the stage name of Suzanne Clair, in "Pimpernel" Smith and First of the Few in minor roles, acted as his secretary, but died in 1942 of pneumonia in her early 30s, six months before Howard's death. In his will, Howard had left her his Beverly Hills house. His home in England was Stowe Maries, a 16th-century six-bedroom farmhouse on the edge of Westcott village near Dorking, Surrey.

Howard's will revealed an estate of $251,000, or £62,761 (in 1943 pounds sterling).

There are also rumors of affairs with Norma Shearer and Myrna Loy (during filming of The Animal Kingdom). Howard was friends with Humphrey Bogart. They worked together on The Petrified Forest on Broadway in 1935, and later in the film version. Bogart's daughter, born in 1952, was named Leslie Howard Bogart.