 After small roles in The Way Ahead (d. Carol Reed, 1944) and The Way to the Stars (d. Anthony Asquith, 1945), Trevor Howard played the object of Celia Johnson's tremulously awakened love in David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945). His grave, courteous charm made him a star at once, and he played another married woman's lover for Lean in The Passionate Friends (1948).
He offered a new kind of male lead in British films: steady, middle-class, reassuring, as he so brilliantly is in I See a Dark Stranger (d. Frank Launder, 1946) and, especially, as Major Calloway in The Third Man (d. Carol Reed, 1949), but also capable of suggesting neurosis under the tweedy demeanour.
It is a shock to find him unshaven and on the run in They Made Me a Fugitive (d. Cavalcanti, 1947), but the stereotype of English gent continues to founder in very compelling ways: he is hopelessly degenerate in Outcast of the Islands (d. Carol Reed, 1951), morally tormented in The Heart of the Matter (d. George More O'Ferrall, 1953), sexually infatuated with Manuela (d. Guy Hamilton, 1957), and D.H. Lawrence's rambunctious, defeated Morel to the life in Sons and Lovers (d. Jack Cardiff, 1960).
There was plenty of conventional stuff along the way and, like so many of his peers, he settled into character cameos in later life, but for over ten years he was a major British actor.
RADA-trained, he made his West End debut in 1938 and entered films when he was invalided out of the Royal Artillery in 1943. He was married to Helen Cherry.
Books: Trevor Howard: A Gentleman and a Player by Vivienne Knight (1986); Trevor Howard: The Man and His Films by Trevor Munn (1990).
Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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