Hunt is on for busts that knew too much

 
p16 p17 diary Leslie Howard Caption: 1st August 1928: British actor Leslie Howard, who is appearing at the Lyric Theatre, London.
Getty
29 January 2013

Anthony Hopkins — where are you? A new Hitchcock thriller is in the offing involving Hollywood actor Leslie Howard, who disappeared 70 years ago on a flight from Lisbon to Britain.

The story goes that the Nazis shot down the DC-3 aircraft because they thought Churchill was on board. Howard’s tax adviser Alfred Chenhalls, who was also on board in June 1943, smoked cigars and looked very like the wartime PM, as explained in Ian Colvin’s 1957 book, Flight 777: The Mystery of Leslie Howard.

Alfred Hitchcock was commissioned to direct a film of the book, but it was banned by Howard’s widow, Ruth, who wanted to cover up her late husband’s affair with Violette Cunnington, a star of one of his films.

Last night a further twist emerged. The book was relaunched at Daunt Books in Holland Park by Ian Colvin’s daughter Clare, a Sunday Express opera critic. One of the guests was Aurelia Young, wife of Tory chief whip Sir George Young and daughter of Churchill’s sculptor friend Oscar Nemon. “My father sculpted Leslie Howard and his mistress Violette Cunnington and both these works are photographed in the book,” Lady Young told me. “The busts are both missing but I am on a quest to find them.”

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