Leslie Howard Steiner (3 April 1893 — 1 June 1943), better known by his stage name Leslie Howard, was an English stage and Academy Award-nominated film actor, director, and producer. One of his best-known roles was as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939) along with his roles in Berkeley Square (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), The Petrified Forest (1936), Pygmalion (1938) and Intermezzo (1939).

He was born to English-Jewish mother, Lillian (née Blumberg) and Hungarian-Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner, in Forest Hill, London, United Kingdom, and educated at Dulwich College, London. (In later years, Howard usually listed his birth name as Stainer despite clear records of the correct spelling.) He worked as a bank clerk before enlisting at the outbreak of World War I. He served in the British Army as a subaltern in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, but suffered severe shell shock, which led to him relinquishing his commission in May 1916.

Howard began acting on the London stage in 1917 but had his greatest theatrical success in the United States on Broadway in New York City, New York, gaining fame in plays like Aren't We All? (1923), Outward Bound (1924), and The Green Hat (1925) before becoming an undisputed Broadway star in Her Cardboard Lover (1927). His enormous success as time traveler Peter Standish in Berkeley Square (1929) resulted, the following year, in a call to Hollywood (where he also later repeated the Standish role in a 1933 film version of the play).