In Search Of My Father; A Portrait of Leslie Howard

Usual library distinctions, Pocket Removed, else contents clean, clear and appear

KIRKUS REVIEW: Ronald Howard's father, of course, was movie-star Leslie Howard--and here the son (also an actor) reconstructs, in painstaking detail, the last four years of Leslie Howard's life. . . up to his death at age SO in June 1943, when the Germans shot down the plane that was bringing him back to England from a Spain/Portugal lecture tour. Some of this narrative, which begins when Leslie returns to England from Hollywood in 1939, is modestly involving: his discontent with movie-stardom is effectively captured; and his strange domestic set-up (living through the Blitz mostly with mistress Violette but regularly coming home to wife Ruth) is made oddly affecting--especially when Violette dies of a neglected infection and Ruth steadfastly cares for Leslie, nearly unhinged with grief (he was "supremely selfish in emotional matters"). But the bulk of the book, though always gracefully written, is simply too relentlessly close-focused to engage most US readers.

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