Trevor Howard: the life of the Brief Encounter actor

The film that made his name may have been entitled Brief Encounter, but his stage, movie and TV career was to be anything but brief: actor Trevor Howard held audiences spellbound throughout his professional life. We delve into his life story.

Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith (1913-88) was born in Cliftonville, Kent on September 29 1913 but would become famed as movie heartthrob ‘Trevor Howard’. Everyone should consider a nom-de-plume.He was the son of Arthur Howard-Smith, a Lloyd’s insurance writer, and nurse Mabel née Wallace, hence Trevor’s middle name. Acting was always going to be his thing; the man with the rich, gravelly voice was destined to perform. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), being chosen as best actor in his class at the end of his first year in 1933 and made his professional debut the following year while still a student. After leaving school in 1935 the stage work seems to have been fairly continuous, including several plays in Stratford-upon-Avon. His West End debut came in 1938.

Howard served in the Army during WW2 but doesn’t seem to have had the distinguished military service he claimed to have had. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, South Staffordshire Regiment, in October 1942, but only served for a year before being discharged due to ill-health. He seems to have fibbed about his age, too - not the first person to have done so - claiming to have been born in 1916.

Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson star in the weepy Brief Encounter (1945) (c) Movie Stills Database / www.moviestillsdb

Howard broke into films before the end of the war with an uncredited role in The Way Ahead (1944), then was credited in The Way to the Stars(1945). It was The Way Ahead, though, that lived up to its name as far as Howard was concerned, as this was the film that made director David Lean aware of him, paving the way for the actor's advance. Lean was looking for a leading man for his 1945 film, Brief Encounter, shot before the war ended. Lean recommended Howard to Noël Coward, who’d written the screenplay, and the rest, as they say, is history. Howard got the part of Dr Alec Harvey, appearing opposite Celia Johnson’s Laura Jesson. If you’ve not watched the film please rectify that omission; it’s my favourite. Spoiler alert: it’s about a romance that's doomed when head ultimately rules over heart. Howard had the persona for the role: charming, courteous, yet able to be gravely serious at the point when time ran out on the couple. There’s the romance of steam too (railway, that is) and a score from Rachmaninov. That alliterative triumvirate of romance, railway and Rachmaninov: it’s no wonder the punters loved it. Anyway, notwithstanding all that, Trevor Howard’s nom-de-plume was made aged 32 (or possibly 29, if you believe his version of events - Celia Johnson, aged 36, was apparently discombobulated that her leading man was so much younger than she was - of course, he wasn’t really ‘so much younger’). Romance was clearly in the air not only on-screen but in Howard's private life: he had married the year before fellow actor Helen Cherry. Thirty years later they’d appear together in a horror film, 11 Harrowhouse (1974).

The beach at Newgate Gap, Cliftonville. Trevor Howard was born in this coastal area of Margate in September 1913 (author – Acabashi).

The Third Man (1949), based on a Graham Greene novel, was the next biggie after Brief Encounter and saw Howard acting alongside Orson Welles in a film that was a massive international hit. Howard himself rated this one his best-ever pieces of work; the film of which he was most proud. In an instance of life and art becoming bedfellows, however, he managed to get himself into bother while filming in Vienna during the post-war Cold War era. Being partial to the occasional tipple, Howard was so keen to get to the bar and not waste valuable drinking time he didn’t bother changing out of his actor’s military uniform and promptly got himself arrested for impersonating an officer. You couldn’t make it up. For his role in the depiction of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1960) Howard would receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In his later career Howard would often portray ‘stiff-necked English military officer(s)’, although I’m not sure I’d ever describe him as particularly typecast. Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), in which he played Captain Bligh to Marlon Brando’s Fletcher Christian (they didn’t get on as characters or actors apparently), Von Ryan’s Express (1965), in which he appeared with Frank Sinatra, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), where he portrayed the inept Lord Cardigan, The Count of Monte Cristo (1975), and Staying On (1980), which saw him reunited with Celia Johnson, followed by the multi-Oscar-winning Gandhi (1982). His final role came in The Dawning (1988). In a way it’s a minor miracle that Howard got so many plum roles given his insistence his contracts should always excuse him from working when there was a cricket Test match scheduled, his priorities arranged according to his likes. Perhaps it also helps explain why, in his own words, ‘I’ve been number two in films for donkey’s years’.

Apparently Howard turned down the honour of the CBE in 1982; he was always his own man, was Trevor. He died on January 7 1988 aged 74. That boozing did catch up with him in the end; cirrhosis of the liver being partly responsible for his demise. Rest easy Trevor Howard, a man whose encounter with his movie fans was anything but brief.

Howard (centre) stars alongside Frank Sinatra (left) in ‘Von Ryan’s Express’ (1965), a WW2 adventure movie (source – Movie Stills Database / www.moviestillsdb.com).