John Howard

John Howard was a 20th-century actor who was one of the earliest screen stars to transition into television. He launched his career producing numerous films with Paramount Pictures throughout the 1930s, most notably as Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, the star of the "Bulldog Drummond" adventure series of films that were released en masse between 1937 and 1939. Howard's numerous co-stars en route included John Barrymore, Louise Campbell, and Reginald Denny. His most illustrious film projects, however, were outside the Paramount umbrella, particularly Frank Capra's 1937 drama "Lost Horizon," in which Howard played George Conway alongside star Ronald Colman's Robert Conway, and as George Kittredge, Katherine Hepburn's fiancé in the Oscar-winning romantic comedy "The Philadelphia Story," from 1940, which also starred Cary Grant and James Stewart. After serving with honors in the Navy during World War II, Howard returned to less glamorous, and less central, film roles, though he did keep intermittently active from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s. He was an early adopter of television, meanwhile, making the rounds on numerous theater/playhouse shows starting in the late '40s, and in the latter '50s played two series leads: the title character on the medical drama "Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal" and as Commander John "Pliny" Hawk on "Adventures of the Sea Hawk." Through the '60s, Howard earned spots on many of the decade's top shows, meanwhile working as headmaster at the Highland Hall private school. Howard died at age 81 from heart failure.