Vivien Leigh

• 1. Introduction

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  Vivien Leigh died on the night of the 7th of July 1967, alone on the floor of her Eaton Square flat in London. Her companion John Merivale had left her, as usual, to perform in a play. When he returned just before midnight and found her apparently asleep, he went to bed. Thirty minutes later, he entered the bedroom and discovered her body on the floor. She had been trying to reach the bathroom when her lungs filled with fluid and she fell. She was 53 years old.

  The news reached London's theatre community the following morning. That evening, the lights of every theatre in central London were extinguished for an hour. It was a tribute given to few. And yet the woman they mourned had spent much of her life being told, by one influential critic in particular, that she could not truly act.

  The questions her life raises are not easy ones. How does a woman born in British India in 1913 become one of the most recognised figures in Hollywood history? How does an actress win two Academy Awards while battling chronic tuberculosis and manic depression? And what does it mean to be called, simultaneously, a "consummate actress" and a woman whose beauty prevented people from seeing what she actually was?

• 2. Darjeeling to RADA

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  Vivian Mary Hartley was born on the 5th of November 1913 in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife Gertrude, whose own background wove together Irish, Parsi Indian, and Armenian ancestry. Gertrude's mother had grown up in an orphanage after her Irish family was killed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

  Gertrude Hartley was intent on giving her daughter a rich imaginative life. She introduced the young Vivian to Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Greek mythology, and Indian folklore. At the age of three, Vivian recited "Little Bo Peep" for her mother's amateur theatre group. It was her first stage appearance.

  At six, she was sent from Loreto Convent in Darjeeling to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, Middlesex, where one of her school friends was future actress Maureen O'Sullivan. Vivian confided to O'Sullivan her desire to become "a great actress". Her father then took her out of that school, and for four years the family travelled Europe. She attended schools in Dinard, Biarritz, San Remo, and Paris, and became fluent in both French and Italian.

  The family returned to Britain in 1931, and shortly after, her father enrolled her at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. That same year she met Herbert Leigh Holman, a barrister 13 years her senior. They married on the 20th of December 1932. She left RADA. On the 12th of October 1933, she gave birth to a daughter, Suzanne.

• 3. A Name and a Contract

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  Her friends suggested she take a small uncredited role as a schoolgirl in the film Things Are Looking Up. It was her film debut. Her agent John Gliddon told her that "Vivian Holman" was not a name for an actress, offered many alternatives, and she rejected all of them. She settled on "Vivian Leigh", drawn from her first husband's forename.

  Gliddon recommended her to Alexander Korda, who dismissed her as lacking potential. Then she was cast in the stage play The Mask of Virtue in 1935, directed by Sydney Carroll, and received excellent notices. One article in the Daily Express noted "a lightning change came over her face" - the first public record of the mood shifts that would define the rest of her life. John Betjeman, future poet laureate, called her "the essence of English girlhood". Korda attended her opening night, admitted his error, and signed her to a film contract.

  When Korda moved the play to a larger venue, Leigh could not project her voice adequately for the bigger house and the play closed. In the playbill for that production, director Carroll had changed the spelling of her first name to "Vivien". That spelling stuck. And years later, Leigh reflected on the danger of those first glowing reviews: "some critics saw fit to be as foolish as to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say, because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn't able to carry."

  In the autumn of 1935, at Leigh's own insistence, a mutual friend named John Buckmaster introduced her to Laurence Olivier at the Savoy Grill. Olivier had already seen her in The Mask of Virtue and congratulated her on her performance. An affair began while they filmed Fire Over England in 1937, while both were still married to other people.

• 4. Scarlett O'Hara

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  During the filming of Fire Over England, Leigh read Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind and instructed her American agent to put her name forward to producer David O. Selznick. She told a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara". The Observer's film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled her saying around the same time that Olivier "won't play Rhett Butler, but I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see."

  Hollywood's search for the actress to play Scarlett had become a widely publicised event. Selznick watched Leigh in Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford and concluded she was excellent but "too British" for the part. She travelled to Los Angeles to be with Olivier and to press her case. Myron Selznick, David's brother and her American agent, arranged what became a piece of Hollywood legend: he took Leigh and Olivier to the set where the burning of the Atlanta Depot was being filmed and introduced her to his brother with the words, "Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara."

  The following day, Leigh read a scene for Selznick, who wrote to his wife that it had "narrowed down to Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett and Vivien Leigh". Director George Cukor praised Leigh's "incredible wildness". She secured the role.

  Filming proved grueling. Cukor was dismissed and replaced by Victor Fleming, with whom Leigh quarreled frequently. She and Olivia de Havilland held secret night-time and weekend meetings with the ousted Cukor for guidance on their performances. Leigh was sometimes required to work seven days a week, often late into the night. In one long-distance call to Olivier, who was working in New York, she said: "Puss, my puss, how I hate film acting! Hate, hate, and never want to do another film again!"

  Gone with the Wind won ten Academy Awards, one of them Best Actress for Leigh. She also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. She was unmoved by the film-star machinery that came with it, saying publicly: "I'm not a film star - I'm an actress. Being a film star - just a film star - is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity."

• 5. The Olivier Years

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  On the 31st of August 1940, Olivier and Leigh married at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California. Their witnesses were Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin. Their hosts were Ronald and Benita Colman. Both had finalised divorces from their first spouses that same year, with Esmond receiving custody of Tarquin and Holman custody of Suzanne.

  They had invested almost all of their combined savings of $40,000 in a Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet, which critics savaged. Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times that "although Miss Leigh and Mr. Olivier are handsome young people, they hardly act their parts at all." The failure was a financial disaster. Their film That Hamilton Woman (1941) fared very differently, popular in the United States and an outstanding success in the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill arranged a private screening for a group that included Franklin D. Roosevelt. On its conclusion Churchill said, "Gentlemen, I thought this film would interest you, showing great events similar to those in which you have just been taking part." He also reportedly said of Leigh, "By Jove, she's a clinker."

  In 1943, Leigh toured North Africa as part of a revue for the armed forces, reportedly turning down a studio contract worth $5,000 a week to do it. She fell ill with a persistent cough and fevers, and in 1944 was diagnosed with tuberculosis in her left lung. While filming Caesar and Cleopatra in 1945, she discovered she was pregnant and then suffered a miscarriage. The breakdown that followed was, as Olivier later came to understand, the first of many major bipolar episodes: several days of hyperactivity, then a period of depression, then an explosive collapse, after which Leigh would have no memory of the event but would be "acutely embarrassed and remorseful".

  In 1947, Olivier was knighted and Leigh accompanied him to Buckingham Palace for the investiture, becoming Lady Olivier. The following year, they embarked on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand to raise funds for the Old Vic Theatre. The tour was an outstanding success but privately brutal. In Christchurch, New Zealand, a row about a missing pair of shoes ended with Olivier screaming an obscenity at Leigh and slapping her face, and Leigh slapping him back, dismayed that he would strike her publicly. She then made her way to the stage in borrowed pumps and, within seconds, had "dried her tears and smiled brightly onstage". Olivier later told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." He would later say that he "lost Vivien" in Australia.

• 6. Blanche DuBois

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  Tennessee Williams and producer Irene Mayer Selznick saw Leigh perform in The School for Scandal and Antigone before casting her as Blanche DuBois in the West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Olivier was contracted to direct. The play's rape scene and references to promiscuity and homosexuality guaranteed controversy, and the media debate about its suitability added to Leigh's anxiety. She believed in it anyway.

  When the production opened in October 1949, critic J. B. Priestley denounced both the play and Leigh's performance. Kenneth Tynan, who would spend years making a habit of dismissing her stage work, argued that she was badly miscast because British actors were "too well-bred to emote effectively on stage". After 326 performances, Leigh ended her run.

  The film version followed. Director Elia Kazan had originally favoured Jessica Tandy and then Olivia de Havilland over Leigh, and later said he did not hold her in high regard, believing she had "a small talent". His view changed entirely as filming progressed. He came to describe her as possessing "the greatest determination to excel of any actress I've known. She'd have crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance." Leigh herself told the Los Angeles Times, "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me."

• 7. Illness and the Final Stage

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  In January 1953, Leigh travelled to Ceylon to film Elephant Walk with Peter Finch. Shortly after filming began, she had a nervous breakdown and Paramount Pictures replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier brought her home to Britain. During periods of incoherence, she told him she was in love with Finch and had been having an affair with him. David Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad". Noël Coward noted in his diary his surprise that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts".

  She recovered sufficiently to perform at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955, where she and Olivier played in Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Titus Andronicus to capacity houses. John Gielgud, who directed Twelfth Night, wrote candidly that Leigh was "brainier than he but not a born actress" and that she "hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique and doing anything that she has not killed the spontaneity of by over-practice".

  In 1960, Leigh began a relationship with actor John Merivale, who knew of her medical condition and assured Olivier he would care for her. That same year, she and Olivier divorced. Olivier wrote in his autobiography of the years of strain: "Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness - an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me."

  Leigh's last screen appearance came in Ship of Fools in 1965. Director Stanley Kramer had been initially unaware of her fragile mental and physical state. He later recalled: "She was ill, and the courage to go ahead, the courage to make the film - was almost unbelievable." During the film's attempted rape scene, Leigh became distraught and struck co-star Lee Marvin with a spiked shoe hard enough to mark his face. Both Marvin and Simone Signoret were sympathetic and understanding. Leigh won the L'Etoile de Cristal for her performance.

  In May 1967, she was rehearsing to appear with Michael Redgrave in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance when her tuberculosis resurfaced. She seemed to recover. Then, on the night of the 7th of July, Merivale left her to go to the theatre. When he returned home just before midnight, she appeared to be asleep. About thirty minutes later, he found her on the floor. Olivier was in a nearby hospital receiving treatment for prostate cancer. He described his "grievous anguish" as he made his way to her flat. He stood beside her and, in his own words, "prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us".

• 8. Beauty as Obstacle

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  George Cukor called Leigh a "consummate actress, hampered by beauty". Laurence Olivier said critics should "give her credit for being an actress and not go on forever letting their judgments be distorted by her great beauty". Garson Kanin, who had witnessed their wedding, described her as "a stunner whose ravishing beauty often tended to obscure her staggering achievements as an actress".

  Leigh herself addressed this directly: "People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap, if you really want to look like the part you're playing, which isn't necessarily like you."

  Her greatest antagonist was Kenneth Tynan, who spent years delivering withering assessments of her stage work. After her death, Tynan revised his position, calling his earlier criticism "one of the worst errors of judgment" he had ever made. He came to believe that Leigh's interpretation of Lady Macbeth, in which the character uses sexual allure to hold Macbeth enthralled, "made more sense... than the usual battle-axe" portrayal. In a 1983 interview after Tynan's own death, his widow called the campaign against Leigh "completely unnecessary".

  Leigh played as many different roles as possible specifically to combat the prejudice her appearance created. She believed comedy was harder to play than drama, requiring more precise timing, and argued that it deserved more emphasis in an actor's training. Nearing the end of her career she observed: "It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh."

  In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema. Her papers, including letters, photographs, contracts, and diaries, were owned by her daughter Suzanne Farrington until Farrington's death in 2015. In 2013, an archive of Leigh's letters, diaries, annotated scripts, and awards was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London - the same year that Royal Mail included her in their "Great Britons" commemorative stamp issue, on the centenary of her birth.