Vivien Leigh

Did You Know?

For much of her life, Vivien Leigh suffered from mental illness. After a breakdown in the 1950s she was sent to Netherne Hospital in Surrey for a week and underwent the controversial ECT treatment.

Birth name:

Vivian Mary Hartley

Height:

5' 3½" (1.61 m)

Spouse:

Laurence Olivier (31 August 1940 - 2 December 1960) (divorced)

Herbert Leigh Holman (20 December 1932 - February 1940) (divorced) 1 child

Remembered For?

Scarlett O'Hara, Blanche Dubois, two Oscars, life as Lady Olivier, life after Lady Olivier, bouts of hysteria and depression, the affair with Peter Finch, and her perculiar 'poetic' nervousness.




That Scarlett Woman!

Vivien Leigh's rise to stardom can be traced back to December 10,1938, when Atlanta - simulated by a group of old sets - was going up in flames a second time. The long delayed filming of Gone With The Wind (1939) was finally underway, even though the Scarlett O'Hara role remained to be cast - an extraordinary risk for director David O.Selznick to run. Between setting up the takes, Myron Selznick, one of Hollywood's foremost agents approached his brother, beckoning from the shadows of the old Pathe back-lot a slender young woman with beautiful eyes. Myron uttered:
'Dave, I want you to meet Scarlett O'Hara.'

That, at least, is the story of how Vivien Leigh came to be cast in the role coveted or claimed at one time or another by every rising, established or waning female star in Hollywood. Perhaps the only exceptions were Barbara Stanwyck (who was aware her screen persona made her unsuitable for the part) and Hedy Lamarr (whose Viennese accent cancelled her out).

The carefully orchestrated search ended in a coup de theatre with the relevation that an English actress, with only a few films to her credit, was to play the Southern heroine of the the novel that, since 1936, had outsold the bible in the USA. The fact that Vivien Leigh was not American failed to outrage the many Scarlett O'Hara fans in the Deep South; the unforgivable miscasting would have been to let a Yankee play the role!



Gone With The Wind
(1939)




After diction lessons, Vivien Leigh successfully added the right touch of molasses to her clipped English delivery. She was also coached (first officially and later privately) by George Cukor, Selznick's original choice to direct Gone With The Wind. She battled constantly with Victor Fleming (the director who replaced George Cukor after three weeks), failed to make friends with her co-star Clark Gable, threw tantrums on the set and off, and won an Oscar.

The Truth about Scarlett?

Her achievement still stands, even if there remains doubt as to how she came to play the role. Another version of the story is that Victor Saville, the British director who directed Leigh in Storm in a Teacup (1937) rang her London flat one day and said:

'Vivien, I've just read a great story for the movies about the bitchiest of all bitches, and you're just the person to play the part.'

Resolved to try for the part of Scarlett, Leigh followed Laurence Olivier - then her paramour, later her husband - to California, where he was to play Heathcliff in Samuel Goldwyn's production of Wuthering Heights (1939).





Vivien Leigh
(1939)




It seems she was probably seen by - and made a strong impression on - David O. Selznick and Cukor, and was kept under wraps while the continuing search for Scarlett gathered a million dollars worth of publicity. She was then made to appear, like a rabbit out of Myron Selznick's hat, to snatch the part.

The English Rose of Hollywood

At 26 she became a priceless commodity in the industry. David O. Selznick, the sole proprietor of her contract, doled her talents out parsimoniously: first to MGM for Waterloo Bridge (1940), then to Alexander Korda, who had originally discovered Leigh in Britain, for That Hamilton Woman (1941). There followed an absence from screen dictated by war and sickness. She reappeared as Bernard Shaw's Egyptian kitten of a queen in Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), looking ravaged and mature enough to play Shakespeare's Cleopatra.

She was Tennessee Williams' own choice for the part of Blanche DuBois in his play A Streetcar Named Desire. The play was filmed in 1951, and this time Leigh's Southern drawl was so convincing that it seemed to issue from a dark bruised recess of her being. A sense of inevitable decline is captured in the curtain line: 'After all, I've always depended on the kindness of stranger' - a melancholy echo of that other famous exit line 'After all, tomorrow is another day', which summed up the headstrong, vixenish, egotistical Scarlett.