Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh (/liː/ LEE; born Vivian Mary Hartley; 5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967), styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her performances as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. She also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway musical version of Tovarich (1963). Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema.
Vivien Leigh
8 July 1967 (aged 53)
Actress
1935–1967
- Lady Olivier (1947–1960)
- Vivien, Lady Olivier (1960–1967)
-
Herbert Leigh Holman(m. 1932; div. 1940)
John Merivale (1960–1967)
After completing her drama school education, Leigh appeared in small roles in four films in 1935 and progressed to the role of heroine in Fire Over England (1937). Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that her physical attributes sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. Despite her fame as a screen actress, Leigh was primarily a stage performer. During her 30-year career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. Later in life, she performed as a character actress in a few films.
At the time, the public strongly identified Leigh with her second husband, Laurence Olivier, who was her spouse from 1940 to 1960. Leigh and Olivier starred together in many stage productions, with Olivier often directing, and in three films. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, and for much of her life she had bipolar disorder, as well as recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s and ultimately led to her death at age 53.[1]
Life and career[edit]
1913–1934: Early life and acting debut[edit]
Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley[2] on 5 November 1913 in British India on the campus of St. Paul's School in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency. She was the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances (née Yackjee; she also used her mother's maiden name of Robinson).[3] Her father was born in Scotland in 1882, while her mother, a devout Catholic, was born in Darjeeling in 1888 and might have been of Irish, Parsi Indian and Armenian ancestry.[4][5][6] Gertrude's parents, who lived in India, were Michael John Yackjee (born 1840), an Anglo-Indian man of independent means, and Mary Teresa Robinson (born 1856), who was born to an Irish family killed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and grew up in an orphanage, where she met Yackjee; they married in 1872 and had five children, of whom Gertrude was the youngest.[6] Ernest and Gertrude Hartley were married in 1912 in Kensington, London.[7]
In 1917, Ernest Hartley was transferred to Bangalore as an officer in the Indian Cavalry, while Gertrude and Vivian stayed in Ootacamund.[8] At the age of three, Vivian made her first stage appearance for her mother's amateur theatre group, reciting "Little Bo Peep".[9] Gertrude Hartley tried to instill an appreciation of literature in her daughter and introduced her to the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, as well as stories of Greek mythology and Indian folklore.[10] At the age of six, Vivian was sent by her mother from Loreto Convent, Darjeeling, to the Convent of the Sacred Heart (now Woldingham School) then situated in Roehampton, south-west London.[11] One of her friends there was future actress Maureen O'Sullivan, two years her senior, to whom Vivian expressed her desire to become "a great actress".[12][13] She was removed from the school by her father, and travelling with her parents for four years, she attended schools in Europe, notably in Dinard (Brittany, France), Biarritz (France), the Sacred Heart in San Remo on the Italian Riviera, and in Paris, becoming fluent in both French and Italian.[14] The family returned to Britain in 1931. She attended A Connecticut Yankee, one of O'Sullivan's films playing in London's West End, and told her parents of her ambitions to become an actress. Shortly after, her father enrolled Vivian at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.[15]
Vivian met Herbert Leigh Holman, known as Leigh Holman, a barrister 13 years her senior, in 1931.[16] Despite his disapproval of "theatrical people", they married on 20 December 1932 and she terminated her studies at RADA, her attendance and interest in acting having already waned after meeting Holman.[17] On 12 October 1933 in London, she gave birth to a daughter, Suzanne, later Suzanne Farrington.[18][a]
1935–1939: Early career and Laurence Olivier[edit]
Leigh's friends suggested she take a minor role as a schoolgirl in the film Things Are Looking Up, which was her film debut, albeit uncredited as an extra.[21] She engaged an agent, John Gliddon, who believed that "Vivian Holman" was not a suitable name for an actress. After rejecting his many suggestions, she took "Vivian Leigh" as her professional name.[22][b] Gliddon recommended her to Alexander Korda as a possible film actress, but Korda rejected her as lacking potential.[24] She was cast in the play The Mask of Virtue, directed by Sydney Carroll in 1935, and received excellent reviews, followed by interviews and newspaper articles. One such article was from the Daily Express, in which the interviewer noted that "a lightning change came over her face", which was the first public mention of the rapid changes in mood that had become characteristic of her.[25] John Betjeman, future poet laureate, described her as "the essence of English girlhood".[26] Korda attended her opening night performance, admitted his error, and signed her to a film contract.[22] She continued with the play but, when Korda moved it to a larger theatre, Leigh was found to be unable to project her voice adequately or to hold the attention of so large an audience, and the play closed soon after.[27] In the playbill, Carroll had revised the spelling of her first name to "Vivien".[28]
In 1960, Leigh recalled her ambivalence towards her first experience of critical acclaim and sudden fame, commenting that "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. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said for those first notices.[29] I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well and have never forgiven him."[30]
In the autumn of 1935 and at Leigh's insistence, John Buckmaster introduced her to Laurence Olivier at the Savoy Grill, where he and his first wife Jill Esmond dined regularly after his performance in Romeo and Juliet.[31] Olivier had seen Leigh in The Mask of Virtue earlier in May and congratulated her on her performance. Olivier and Leigh began an affair while acting as lovers in Fire Over England (1937), while Olivier was still married to Esmond and Leigh to Holman.[32] During this period, Leigh read the Margaret Mitchell novel Gone with the Wind and instructed her American agent to recommend her to David O. Selznick, who was planning a film version.[33] She remarked to a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara", and The Observer film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled a conversation of the same period in which Leigh "stunned us all" with the assertion that Olivier "won't play Rhett Butler, but I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see."[34]
Despite her relative inexperience, Leigh was chosen to play Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet in an Old Vic Theatre production staged at Elsinore, Denmark.[35] Olivier later recalled an incident when her mood rapidly changed as she was preparing to go onstage. Without apparent provocation, she began screaming at him before suddenly becoming silent and staring into space. She was able to perform without mishap, and by the following day she had returned to normal with no recollection of the event. It was the first time Olivier witnessed such behaviour from her.[36] They began living together, as their respective spouses had each refused to grant either of them a divorce.[37] Under the moral standards then enforced by the film industry, their relationship had to be kept from public view.
Leigh appeared with Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O'Sullivan in A Yank at Oxford (1938), which was the first of her films to receive attention in the United States. During production, she developed a reputation for being difficult and unreasonable, partly because she disliked her secondary role but mainly because her petulant antics seemed to be paying dividends.[38] After dealing with the threat of a lawsuit brought over a frivolous incident, Korda instructed her agent to warn her that her option would not be renewed if her behaviour did not improve.[39] Her next role was in Sidewalks of London, also known as St. Martin's Lane (1938), with Charles Laughton.[40]
Olivier had been attempting to broaden his film career. He was not well known in the United States despite his success in Britain, and earlier attempts to introduce him to American audiences had failed. Offered the role of Heathcliff in Samuel Goldwyn's production of Wuthering Heights (1939), he travelled to Hollywood, leaving Leigh in London. Goldwyn and the film's director, William Wyler, offered Leigh the secondary role of Isabella, but she refused, preferring the role of Cathy, which went to Merle Oberon.[41]