Vivien Mary Hartley was an English stage and film actress and as Robert Osborne points out that 80% of the most sought after roles in Hollywood between 1939-59 were offered to our August Golden Age Star Vivien Leigh. She was a staggeringly beautiful woman but when she was offered the lead in Gone With the Wind in 1939 many were incredulous that here was an English actress being offered the role of a lifetime as Southern Belle Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s immortal classic. What was more incredible were some of the Hollywood stars who tried for the role and failed. Stars like; Paulette Goddard, Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Joan Bennett, Jean Arthur and Talullah Bankhead. But in the end Selznick Studios picked the right one as Leigh won her 1st Academy Award and the film 10 in all. (8 competitive and 2 honorary with 13 nominations in all)
Vivien Hartley born November 13, 1915 in India to a Yorkshire stockbroker and his Irish wife. The young Vivien began her education in a convent. At 6 years old she announced to a young friend that one day she would be famous. That childhood friend turned out to be Maureen O’Sullivan who encouraged her to begin an acting career. As she grew older her schooling beside took her abroad to France, Italy and Germany where she became fluent in both Italian and French. Married young at 19 to a German lawyer named Herbert Leigh Holiman she took his middle name and changed the spelling of her first name using e instead of the more common a.
In 1935, she took to the stage in a play The Bash that wasn’t very successful but impressed a London producer Sydney Carroll and he gave her the lead in Things Are Looking Up. Not strangely things began to change radically after that as she began acting in Shakespearean plays and met her 2nd husband Laurence Olivier. Although both married at the time they cavorted publicly and collaborated in their acting career as well.
After the success of Gone With The Wind the two married in 1940 and began to star on stage and in the movies but then chose to stay out of the limelight after highly public one whilst both married. In hindsight it might have been Vivien’s mental health, as they would often take breaks between performances. Leigh suffered from manic depression and it put a strain on their relationship in later years. In fact in 1944 while in rehearsal for Antony and Cleopatra she suffered a miscarriage and her health began to spiral downward with insomnia, bipolar disorder and then a respiratory ailment, which later was diagnosed as tuberculosis. Vivien tried shock treatment, which left burn marks on her temples and then her drinking escalated as well.
Throughout she continued to work but no role could match the one of Scarlett until 1949 when she secured the part of Blanche Du Bois in a London production of Tennessee William’s play A Streetcar Named Desire. The play lasted a year and Elia Kazan quick to capitalize on it’s success had her reprise the role for Hollywood opposite Marlon Brando it was here she won her 2nd Academy Award. Her performance some say exceeded her role in GWTW. Vivien suggested her own struggles let her tap into the character and as she later recounted tipped her into “madness”
Not long after she and Olivier made stage history when they simultaneously starred in a Shakespeare production of Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw offering of Caesar and Cleopatra. Despite these monumental successes the bipolar disease tightened it's grip on Vivien and coupled with her 2nd miscarriage she had a full breakdown in 1953. Studio acrimony had her odds with productions afterward and her relationship with Laurence began to crumble and they ended their union in 1960.
Maybe the change did her good as Olivier remarried and Vivien moved in with a younger man and her career seemed revitalized albeit for a short time as she earned a Tony Award in a musical adaptation of Tovarich in 1963 and two years later acclaim in the Academy Award winning Ship of Fools. But in 1967 while filming A Delicate Balance the respiratory troubles of tuberculosis took Vivien’s life. She was only 53. London’s theater district blacked out for an hour in her honor.
Vivien would say I am not a film star I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity. An interesting quote when juxtaposed against what some stars think of themselves today. She would also say that beauty could be a handicap as some might think if you look reasonable you can’t possibly act and as she only cared about acting she felt her looks worked against her sometimes. And finally she said that she dreaded the truth in some of her lines but she told herself I could never let that show.
Footnotes.
Vivien had a vixen side and husband Olivier couldn’t keep up with her marathon ways and it became burdensome for him. He affectionately referred to her as “Puss”. And during the filming of GWTW Vivien claimed that Gable tried to rape her probably getting overheated watching her getting tied in to a 16-inch waistcoat during filming of GWTW.
