"Pimpernel" Smith is a 1941 British anti-Nazi thriller, produced and directed by its star Leslie Howard, which updates his role in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) from Revolutionary France to pre-Second World War Europe. The British Film Yearbook for 1945 described his work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda".
Original theatrical poster
Leslie Howard Steiner was an English actor, director, producer and writer. He wrote many stories and articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and was one of the biggest box-office draws and movie idols of the 1930s.
Howard as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, 1939
English Heritage blue plaque at 45 Farquhar Road, Upper Norwood, London
Humphrey Bogart (left) and Leslie Howard (standing center) in the Broadway stage production of The Petrified Forest (1935)
Howard as Sir Percy Blakeney (alter ego of the Scarlet Pimpernel) next to Merle Oberon as Lady Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)