Barbara Howard

Barbara Howard (b. Bloemfontein, 08/07/1934) was a once-off actress.

Biography

Barbara Howard was the daughter of William Bramley and Sophie Nothard, but her mother died when she was just two years old and her father, who was a civil servant, remarried four years later. According to various newspaper reports, when she was eighteen years old she met and fell in love with a former Australian war photographer, paratrooper and self-styled adventurer called Jim (James Charles) Howard and eloped with him to East Africa. Here she is said to have become a journalist and in an interview she said that she had handled continuity on two Hollywood films that had been shot in Kenya, namely Something of Value (1957) and Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959). Her husband had a troubled relationship with the authorities in various countries and was eventually declared an undesirable immigrant. They returned to South Africa, but in November 1960 he was deported from there as well. They were divorced in February 1961.

At this stage she accepted a role in Denis Scully’s mining drama Tremor (1961). Scully’s partner in his next film, Journey into Nowhere (1962) was lawyer James Kantor and Kantor’s brother-in-law was Harold Wolpe, who was one of the accused in the Rivonia trial. As a result Kantor was also arrested, though the case against him was dismissed. In the meantime Barbara Howard had married Kantor(who had previously been married to actress Marilyn Patterson) and supported him throughout the months of his trial. After he had been freed, Kantor left for Great Britain, where Barbara joined him with her two young sons from her previous marriage in June 1964. With Kantor she had a daughter. The couple were divorced approximately two years before he died in 1974.