If my life were devoted solely to acting, I'd never appear in a film

[sovay]

Happy birthday, Leslie Howard! A hundred and twenty-four years ago you were born Leslie Howard Steiner and I am so very grateful you did not stay a bank clerk. You were one of my formative actors and one of the great hot intellectuals of the screen and you punched Nazis with art and I am glad you are in the zeitgeist for it lately, because that thing where for decades you were remembered mostly for Gone with the Wind (1939) was awkward. You inspired H.P. Lovecraft and Raoul Wallenberg and I wrote a poem out of one of your characters once. I seem to have have written about a highly random assortment of your movies over the years (and I want credit for not compulsively rewriting the post about Pygmalion on the spot, even though it really needs it):

Berkeley Square (1933), dir. Frank Lloyd
Captured! (1933), dir. Roy Del Ruth
The Petrified Forest (1936), dir. Archie Mayo
Stand-In (1937), dir. Tay Garnett
Pygmalion (1938), dir. Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard & David Lean
49th Parallel (1941), dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Pimpernel Smith (1941), dir. Leslie Howard
The First of the Few (1942), dir. Leslie Howard
The Gentle Sex (1943), dir. Leslie Howard

This is not a numerically significant anniversary, so I'm not going to try for some sort of summing-up essay of your influence on my life or my interest in film, although neither is negligible; I am going to post this gif of you eating a banana because I continue to think it's one of the funniest things Tumblr has ever turned up and point out that I think your weird cat-face was beautiful in portraits where you were shot like a romantic hero and in candids where you looked like a terrific nerd and pretty frequently, if you ask me, you counted as both at once. The fact that generations of fans—and not a few lovers—agreed with me will never cease to delight me. You should have played Peter Wimsey. I will fancast that till I die. I have no idea what happened here.

Your memory for a blessing. If you'd never appeared in a film, I'd never have known.

Comments

Re: For what it's worth

[sovay]

You are not a bad person for not knowing this, as I don't expect anyone except maybe my wife to read my LJ. Hell, even my girlfriend doesn't read it

Why would I think I was a bad person? Not everyone has the same handles on DW and LJ—if they're on both platforms in the first place—so I always double-check with people.

I'm glad to know where you are.

Re: For what it's worth

[drwex]

Some people, including myself, feel guilty for asking people questions that the questioner could have known the answers to by reading the questionee's journal. I dislike that guilt and hope not to induce it in other people because I think it presumes that the speaker feels their life/journal/blog is more important than the readers' time.

Re: For what it's worth

[sovay]

Some people, including myself, feel guilty for asking people questions that the questioner could have known the answers to by reading the questionee's journal.

I think your efforts may have had the opposite effect from your intentions, then, since while I did not feel at all weird about asking you straight out if you were on Dreamwidth—information that not all LJ-users share in their profiles or their pages, by the way, so sometimes it cannot be ascertained from reading other people's journals—I now feel that you are trying to guilt-trip me for not having thought to look in the first place. I understand that is not your goal. I think the problem started when you told me I wasn't a bad person for something it hadn't even crossed my mind to feel bad about, thus opening the possibility that perhaps in some way I should.

Re: For what it's worth

[drwex]

Ugh. Darned if I do and darned if I don't. Sorry about the weirdness.

Re: For what it's worth

[sovay]

Sorry about the weirdness.

Thanks. I think the preemptive reassurance was where it went wrong.