Oscar Profile #123: Vivien Leigh

Born Vivian Mary Hartley on November 5, 1913, the future Vivien Leigh was the daughter of a British Army officer stationed in India and his wife whose activities included an amateur theatre group. Young Vivian made her stage debut with her mother’s group at the age three reciting “Little Bo Peep”. Educated at Catholic schools in London from the age of six, one of her best friends was future actress Maureen O’Sullivan, two years her senior. Future schooling came while traveling with her father in Europe. She returned to England in 1931 whereupon her father enrolled her in RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts). That same year she met and married barrister Leigh Holman, thirteen years her senior, and gave up studying acting. In October, 1933 she gave birth to a daughter who would make her a grandmother three times over within her lifetime.

Seeing O’Sullivan on screen awakened Leigh’s determination to have an acting career. By 1935 she had a starring role in The Mask of Virtue on the London stage for which she received excellent notices and was featured in numerous newspaper articles. The bipolar actress was upset with the reviews calling her a great actress because they gave her more to live up to than she thought possible.

She met Laurence Olivier when he came to see her backstage and the two developed a friendship that turned into an affair after they made 1937’s Fire Over England while Olivier was still married to actress Jill Esmond and Leigh to Holman. Both spouses refused to grant divorces and although the pair was now living together, under the strict moral code of the day they had to keep their relationship from the public.

Leigh made A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor and old friend Maureen O’Sullivan and St. Martin’s Lane with Charles Laughton before becoming an international with the fabled Gone With the Wind in 1939 for which she won her first Oscar.

With their respective spouses finally agreeing to divorce them, Leigh and Olivier were married in 1940 although both had to give up custody of their children.

Under contract to David O. Selznick, she had wanted to make both Rebecca and Pride and Prejudice with Olivier but Joan Fontaine and Greer Garson were respectively cast instead. The two were set to star in Waterloo Bridge but Olivier was replaced at the last minute with Robert Taylor. The two did make That Hamilton Woman together in 1941.

On stage through most the 1940s, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1944 before filming 1945’s Caesar and Cleopatra and suffered from severe depression after a miscarriage before filming 1948’s Anna Karenina, her only two films of the era.

Appearing with Olivier in the London stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, she was tapped for the film version opposite Marlon Brando, for which she won her second Oscar.

Recurring bouts of tuberculosis and manic depression did not deter her stage career but kept her off the screen for most of the 1950s. Her only film during this period was 1955’s The Deep Blue Sea. In 1958 she began an affair with John Merivale, Gladys Cooper’s actor stepson, who promised Olivier he would take good care of her. Finally free of the burden of interrupting his own career to care for the increasingly mentally ill Leigh, Olivier married actress Joan Plowright who played his daughter in The Entertainer in 1960. They remained happily married until Olivier’s death in 1989.

Merivale stood by Leigh’s side until her death in 1967 at the age of 54. In her last years, Leigh was well enough to star in two major films, 1961’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone opposite Warren Beatty and 1965’s Ship of Fools opposite Lee Marvin. She also starred in the 1963 Broadway musical Tovarich for which she won a Tony.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), directed by Victor Fleming

Leigh told friends in 1937 after reading the novel that she would play Scarlet O’Hara in the film. No one believed her until she actually won the part over some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. The English beauty’s transformation into the willful Southern belle remains one of the iconic performances in screen history.

Leigh became fast friends with everyone in the cast except, ironically, fellow British star Leslie Howard with whom she clashed in their several scenes together. Her celebrated Oscar winning performance made each of her subsequent films an event.

WATERLOO BRIDGE (1940), directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Robert E. Sherwood’s play had been filmed more explicitly in 1931 with Mae Clarke and Douglass Montgomery and would be re-made in 1956 as Gaby with Leslie Caron and John Kerr in which the lead character’s descent into prostitution is clearer, but this somewhat disguised, tender, heartbreaking version of the story remains almost everyone’s favorite version.

Leigh has never been lovelier than as the ballerina who is unnerved by what she believes is the death of her soldier fiancé only to find he’s still alive after the war. Robert Taylor, in one of his least stiff performances, Virginia Field, Maria Ouspenskaya and Lucile Watson also turn in memorable performances.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951), directed by Elia Kazan

Leigh and Olivier were trounced by the critics when they performed Tennessee Williams’ play on the London stage in 1949, but audiences loved them in it. When Hollywood decided to make the film with all but Broadway’s original leading lady, Jessica Tandy, Olivia de Havilland was sought for the role but she declined as she thought it was inappropriate to her image. Leigh stepped in, creating an immediate rapport with Marlon Brando whose character she loathes on screen. Director Kazan, however, was not happy with the producers’ choice of Leigh, considering her a limited actress. She won his admiration, though, with her dedication causing him to later say that she would have crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance.

Leigh won a much deserved second Oscar for playing faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois who audiences saw as a Scarlet O’Hara who had gotten her comeuppance.

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1961), directed by José Quintero

Sourced from Tennessee Williams’ 1950 novella about an aging actress who, after the death of her much older husband, settles in Rome and has a disastrous affair with a gigolo, the film was quite controversial at the time, although it was Lotte Lenya’s Oscar nominated portrayal of a female panderer (or pimp) which got all the acclaim. Leigh’s performance at the time was considered a step down from Scarlet O’Hara and Blanche DuBois. Since her death, however, and the revelations about her mental state, her portrayal of a repressed woman who discovers the joys of sex late in life have come to symbolize audiences’ perception of the real life Leigh.

The 2003 TV remake with Helen Mirren and Anne Bancroft in the Leigh-Lenya roles is a better film, and Olivier Martinez certainly makes a more believable Italian gigolo than Warren Beatty with his hideous Italian stage accent, but this version is still worth seeing for Leigh and Lenya.

SHIP OF FOOLS (1965), directed by Stanley Kramer

Leigh’s portrayal of the self-involved and self-loathing Mrs. Treadwell earned her some of the best notices of her exceptional career, but it was co-stars Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret and Michael Dunn who received the film’s acting Oscar nominations and another co-star, Lee Marvin, with whom Leigh had most of her scenes, who won the year’s Best Actor Oscar, albeit for his role in another 1965 film, Cat Ballou. Critics and Oscar voters were astonished at the long time character actor’s sudden emergence as a top drawer actor, helped immeasurably by his portrayal of a drunk opposite Leigh’s needy, sex-starved widow.