Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh: Scarlett O'Hara's Unquiet Genius

When Myron Selznick brought a young English actress onto the burning-Atlanta set of his brother's production and said, "Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara," it was meant as a joke about David Selznick's exhausting search for the right actress. Vivien Leigh went on to make the line sound less like a joke and more like a diagnosis — of a talent so complete it unsettled the people closest to it, and of a mind that would eventually be diagnosed, in earnest, with the illness then called manic depression.

A Childhood Across Continents

She was born Vivian Mary Hartley on 5 November 1913 in Darjeeling, British India, the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a Scottish broker, and Gertrude Mary Frances Yackjee, whose ancestry combined Irish, Parsi Indian, and Armenian lines. At three she gave her first performance, reciting "Little Bo Peep" for her mother's amateur theatre group. She was educated at the Loreto Convent in Darjeeling and then the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, with further schooling in France and Italy that left her fluent in both languages before she returned to Britain in 1931. Seeing a film starring her schoolmate Maureen O'Sullivan convinced her to become an actress, and her father enrolled her at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art that same year.

A Marriage, a Rename, a Break

In 1931 she met the barrister Leigh Holman, thirteen years older; they married in December 1932, and she left her training to become his wife, giving birth to a daughter, Suzanne, in October 1933. She returned to acting soon after, and her agent John Gliddon rechristened her Vivien Leigh. An uncredited film debut led to a breakthrough 1935 stage role in *The Mask of Virtue*, which drew such notice that the producer Alexander Korda — who had previously turned her down — signed her to a film contract.

That autumn she met Laurence Olivier at the Savoy Grill. Both were married to others when their affair began during the filming of *Fire Over England* (1937), but the relationship reshaped both their careers and their private lives for the next two decades.

Scarlett O'Hara

Leigh wanted the role of Scarlett O'Hara in David O. Selznick's planned adaptation of *Gone with the Wind* before the production had even settled on a director, telling a journalist flatly: "I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see." Myron Selznick, her American agent and David's brother, arranged the introduction on set during the filming of the burning-Atlanta sequence. A screen test opposite director George Cukor convinced Selznick, who praised her "incredible wildness." Filming under Victor Fleming was punishing — seven-day weeks, late nights, and long separations from Olivier that drove her to complain by transatlantic telephone: "Puss, my puss, how I hate film acting! Hate, hate, and never want to do another film again!" Her co-star Olivia de Havilland later insisted Leigh nonetheless maintained "impeccable discipline" while juggling "doing her best work in an extremely difficult role and being separated from Larry." *Gone with the Wind* (1939) won ten Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Leigh at age twenty-six — the first British performer to win the award. Critic Frank Nugent wrote that she was "so perfectly designed for the part by art and nature that any other actress in the role would be inconceivable."

Marriage, War, and the First Breakdown

Both Leigh and Olivier divorced their spouses in February 1940 and married that August at San Ysidro Ranch in California, with Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin as witnesses. During the Second World War, Leigh turned down a $5,000-a-week studio contract to tour North Africa entertaining troops in 1943. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis in one lung in 1944 and, while filming *Caesar and Cleopatra* the following year, discovered a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage — triggering, by later accounts, the first of many severe depressive episodes tied to bipolar disorder.

Blanche DuBois and the Cost of the Role

In 1951 Leigh played Blanche DuBois in the West End production of *A Streetcar Named Desire*, a performance Tennessee Williams himself said contained "everything that I intended, and much that I had never dreamed of." She reprised the role on film that year and won her second Academy Award, along with a BAFTA, the New York Film Critics Circle Award, and the Volpi Cup. Theatre historian Phyllis Hartnoll called the stage performance "proof of greater powers as an actress than she had hitherto shown." But Leigh herself later said the role "tipped me over into madness," and the critic Kenneth Tynan's dismissive reviews of her stage work — he called her talent "mediocre" and implied she was dragging down Olivier's own performances during their alternating 1951–52 run of two Cleopatra plays in New York — wounded her badly. Tynan later called this one of "the worst errors of judgment" of his career, revising his view after her death.

Collapse and Resilience

In January 1953, while filming *Elephant Walk* in Ceylon, Leigh suffered a breakdown severe enough that Paramount replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor mid-production. She returned home, confessed an affair with her co-star Peter Finch, and slowly stabilized over months. Despite this, she kept working: she starred in Anatole Litvak's *The Deep Blue Sea* (1955), won a Tony Award in 1963 for the musical *Tovarich*, and in 1965 made her final film, *Ship of Fools*. Director Stanley Kramer later called her "courage to go ahead" despite illness "almost unbelievable" — during one scene her paranoia caused her to strike co-star Lee Marvin hard enough with a spiked shoe to leave a mark, yet the performance won her France's L'Étoile de Cristal. She and Olivier divorced in 1960; he married Joan Plowright soon after. Olivier later wrote of her illness that she retained, even through her worst episodes, "her own individual canniness — an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me." From 1960 she found stability with the actor John Merivale, touring Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America to strong reviews between 1961 and 1962.

Why Vivien Is Called a Genius

The word attached itself to Leigh almost by accident — Myron Selznick's introduction was a throwaway line — but critics kept using it in earnest once they watched her work. Her genius, as those closest to her described it, was less raw range than total absorption into character: George Cukor called her a "consummate actress, hampered by beauty," and Olivier pleaded with critics to judge her as an actress rather than a beauty. Garson Kanin called her achievements "staggering." The case is strengthened by scarcity — nineteen films across thirty years, more than half British productions — yet the American Film Institute still ranked her among Hollywood's twenty-five greatest female stars. The honest complication: her most celebrated performances were entangled with the illness that periodically hospitalized her; Blanche DuBois, the role that proved her genius to skeptics like Tynan, was also the role she blamed for pushing her toward breakdown. Whether her intensity on screen was craft, illness, or both remains genuinely unresolved.

Legacy

Leigh's tuberculosis resurfaced while she was rehearsing Edward Albee's *A Delicate Balance* in 1967; on 7–8 July, Merivale found her collapsed, having suffocated as her lungs filled with fluid. She was fifty-three. London's West End theatres dimmed their lights for an hour in tribute. She was cremated after a Catholic service at St Mary's Church, Cadogan Street, her ashes scattered at her Sussex home, Tickerage Mill. Her papers are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library, and the National Library of Australia, and she has appeared on three UK commemorative postage stamps. More than half a century later, Scarlett O'Hara remains the performance by which American cinema measures itself, and Leigh's own account of the cost behind it has become as much a part of her legend as the role itself.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actress — 1952
• Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical — 1963
• Educated at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Woldingham School
• Worked as film actor, stage actor and actor