[1] He 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.

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 (off the coast of Cedeira, A Coruña), on which he was a passenger.

[10] Howard began his professional acting career in regional tours of Peg O' My Heart and Charley's Aunt in 1916–17 and on the London stage in 1917, but had his greatest theatrical success in the United States in Broadway theatre, in plays such as Aren't We All?

He played Matt Denant in John Galsworthy's 1927 Broadway production Escape in which he first made his mark as a dramatic actor.

During the same period he had the misfortune to open on Broadway in Hamlet (1936) just a few weeks after John Gielgud launched a rival production of the same play that was far more successful[13] with both critics and audiences.

He had second billing under Norma Shearer in A Free Soul (1931), which also featured Lionel Barrymore and future Gone With the Wind rival Clark Gable eight years prior to their Civil War masterpiece.

In 1939, as war approached, he played opposite Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo; that August, Howard was determined to return to the country of his birth.

He was eager to help the war effort, but lost any support for a new film, instead being obliged to relinquish £20,000 of holdings in the US before he could leave the country.

Howard is perhaps best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939), his last American film, but he was uncomfortable with Hollywood, and returned to Britain to help with the Second World War effort.

He starred in a number of Second World War films, including 49th Parallel (1941), "Pimpernel" Smith (1941) and The First of the Few (1942, known in the U.S. as Spitfire), the latter two of which he also directed and co-produced.

[40] The following day, 1 June 1943, he was aboard KLM Royal Dutch Airlines/BOAC Flight 777, "G-AGBB" a Douglas DC-3 flying from Lisbon to Bristol, when it was shot down by Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 C-6 maritime fighter aircraft over the Atlantic (off Cedeira, A Coruña).

Luftwaffe records indicate that the Ju 88 maritime fighters were operating beyond their normal patrol area to intercept and shoot down the aircraft.

Hintze further stated that his pilots were angry that the Luftwaffe leaders had not informed them of a scheduled flight between Lisbon and the UK, and that had they known, they could easily have escorted the DC-3 to Bordeaux and captured it and all aboard.

[47] A long-standing but ultimately unsupported hypothesis suggested that the Germans believed that the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was on board the flight.

[48] Churchill's history of World War II suggested that the Germans targeted the commercial flight because the British Prime Minister's "presence in North Africa [for the 1943 Casablanca conference] had been fully reported", and German agents at the Lisbon airfield mistook a "thickset man smoking a cigar" boarding the plane for Churchill returning to England.

[49] The death of the fourteen civilians including Leslie Howard "was a painful shock to me", Churchill wrote; "the brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents".

[27][51] Howard had been travelling through Spain and Portugal lecturing on film, but also meeting with local propagandists and shoring up support for the Allies.

[27] Two passengers were bumped off the flight, George and William Cecil, the teenage sons of Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, who had been recalled to London from their Swiss boarding school, thus saving their lives.

[56] Via an old girlfriend, Conchita Montenegro,[56] Howard had contacts with Ricardo Giménez Arnau, a young diplomat in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

[59] Former CIA agent Joseph B. Smith recalled that, in 1957, he was briefed by the National Security Agency on the need for secrecy and that Leslie Howard's death had been brought up.

The NSA stated that Howard knew his aircraft was to be attacked by German fighters and risked himself to protect the British code-breakers.

[60] A secretly taped account by one of the pilots involved appears in Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer's Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying.

talking about the shooting down of Howard's flight, one seems to express pride in his accomplishment, but states clearly he knew nothing of the passengers' identities or importance until hearing an English broadcast later that evening.

[63] The Mystery of Flight 777, by film-maker Thomas Hamilton, explores the circumstances, theories and myths which have grown around the shooting down of Howard's plane.

Originally intended as a short companion piece to the Leslie Howard film, this project expanded in scope and as of January 2021 is still in production.

This book includes insights on his family life, first impressions of America and Americans when he first moved to the United States to act on Broadway, and his views on democracy in the years prior to and during the Second World War.

However, in early 2014, independent producer Monty Montgomery and Hamilton entered a co-production agreement to complete and release the documentary.

In addition a score was commissioned from composer Maria Antal and considerable post-production sweetening was undertaken on the original material.

This new version, of Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn was screened as a "work in progress" at the San Francisco Mostly British Film Festival on 14 February 2015, with Hamilton, Tracy Jenkins and Derek Partridge in attendance.

[76] The show eventually became Leslie Howard's Matinee[77] with each week bringing a new adapted play popular at the time to radio listeners.