Background

Ethnicity: Her father was born in Scotland, while her mother was born in Darjeeling and may have been of Irish and Armenian or Indian ancestry.

Vivien Leigh was born as Vivian Mary Hartley on November 5, 1913 in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India (nowadays India). She was the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances.

In 1917, Ernest Hartley was transferred to Bangalore as an officer in the Indian Cavalry, while Gertrude and Vivian stayed in Ootacamund. At the age of three, young Vivian made her first stage appearance for her mother's amateur theatre group, reciting "Little Bo Peep". 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.

Education

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, southwest London. 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".

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, Biarritz, San Remo and Paris, becoming fluent in both French and Italian. She attended a finishing school in Paris, studied languages in Italy, and attended a girls' seminary in Bavaria.

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.

Career

In 1932, Leigh decided to get serious about her stage career. She got a part in a British film called Things Are Looking Up in 1934. She landed small parts in several movies and then won her first stage role in 1935 for a production of The Green Sash. Although the play never got to London's famed theater district, her performance caught the attention of Sydney Carroll, a West End producer. She opened later that year in his The Mask of Virtue. The critics were smitten; some said as much by her astounding beauty as her acting ability. However, this role led to her "big break" and she was signed to a five-year film contract.

Although she worked steadily over the next several years, Leigh's career never brought her top status. From 1936 to 1939, Leigh appeared in a number of British stage and screen productions. She was the Queen in Richard II, an Oxford University student drama production directed by John Gielgud, who would become one of England's greatest stage performers. She played Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII and Jessica Morton in Bats in the Belfry. In 1937, she was invited by the Danish government to play Ophelia to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. She also appeared on the London stage in the title role of Serena Blandish.

Leigh was busy on the British silver screen as well. Cast again with Laurence Olivier, she played a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth in Fire Over England, in 1937, followed by Dark Journey and Storm in a Teacup. In 1938, she played opposite American screen idol Robert Taylor in A Yank at Oxford, a film that really only boosted Taylor's career. She also appeared with Charles Laughton that year in St. Martin's Lane, which was released in the United States in 1940 as The Sidewalks of London. This role was a bit of a change for Leigh, as she was cast to play a mean and unscrupulous heroine.

Leigh came to the United States in 1938, where she visited Olivier on the set of Wuthering Heights. Sir Laurence Olivier (who was knighted in 1947) was regarded as one of England's greatest stage actors, noted especially for his Shakespearean roles. Leigh and Olivier had become attracted to each other during the filming of Fire Over England, and their well-publicized romance became a main topic of gossip, especially since they were both already married.

While Leigh and Olivier were spending time together, waiting for their divorces so they could marry, David O. Selznick was looking for a star. It was January 1939, and he was still without an actress to play the most publicized, sought-after role in movie history-Scarlett O'Hara, the extraordinary southern belle who is the main character in Gone With The Wind.

Even without Scarlett, the movie was already in production. Selznick had cast the other important roles: Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, who proves to be more than a match for Scarlett; Leslie Howard as the quiet, gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes, whom Scarlett believes she loves; Olivia de Havilland as the gentle Melanie Hamilton, whom Wilkes marries; and Hattie McDaniel as the black servant who runs Tara with a blustery but devoted sense of duty. Even though many actresses, including Joan Crawford and Lucille Ball, tested for the part, Selznick still had not found the right person. The filming of Gone With the Wind was officially completed about five months later. According to the "Post-Production" section of the Gone With the Wind Homepage, Leigh had worked almost non-stop for five months and was totally exhausted. However, she would soon reap the benefits of her dedication to the project.

Critics called Leigh's performance flawless and brilliant, and she went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film won several other Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and over the years its fame has hardly diminished. From relative obscurity, the name of Vivien Leigh became known worldwide.

She rallied long enough to deliver excellent screen performances in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and Ship of Fools (1965), and to star in a 1963 Broadway musical adaptation of Tovarich, a disastrous production for which Leigh nonetheless won a Tony Award. She ended her career on a note of triumph in the 1966 New York staging of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov. Leigh was in the midst of rehearsals for a stage production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance when she was found dead in her London apartment.

Achievements

• Vivien Leigh went down in history as a film and theatre actress, most famous for her Hollywood movies Gone with the Wind and A Street Car named Desire. She won two Academy Best Actress Awards and two New York Film Critics Circle Awards for both the films. She was not just a movie actress but also a very good theatre performer and for her Musical Broadway, Tovarich, she earned a Tony Award.
  
  In 1969 a plaque to Leigh was placed in the Actors' Church, St Paul's, Covent Garden, London. In 1985 a portrait of her was included in a series of United Kingdom postage stamps, along with Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Sir Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers and David Niven to commemorate "British Film Year". In April 2013 she was again included in another series, this time celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth, achieving the rare accolade for a non-royal of appearing on British stamps on more than one occasion.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Caesar and Cleopatra

    (The Roman conqueror Julius Caesar (Claude Rains) takes ov...)

    1945
  • Gone with the Wind

    (American classic in which a manipulative woman and a rogu...)

    1939
  • Storm in a Teacup

    (Victoria Gow and reporter Frank Burden have a brief, chan...)

    1937
  • Waterloo Bridge

    (British officer Roy visits Waterloo Bridge on the eve of ...)

    1940
  • Ship Of Fools

    (When an eclectic group of passengers boards a cruise ship...)

    1965
  • Anna Karenina

    (This movie revolves around an extra-marital affair betwee...)

    1948
  • Dark Journey

    (Dark Journey is a 1937 British spy film directed by Victo...)

    1937
  • The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

    (A fading stage star gets caught up in the decadent life o...)

    1961
  • That Hamilton Woman

    (This movie features a tragic love story of two married co...)

    1941
  • A Streetcar Named Desire

    (Blanche DuBois, a young woman, must take a streetcar to h...)

    1951
  • Fire Over England

    (A British spy infiltrates the Spanish court to thwart the...)

    1937
  • Sidewalks of London

    (Charles, a street performer, meets Libby and asks her to ...)

    1938
  • 21 Days

    (Larry Durrant, an Englishman, loves a woman, Wanda. Howev...)

    1940

Views

Quotations: "I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity."

"You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me."

"People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap."

"I've always been mad about cats."

"Sometimes I dread the truth of the lines I say. But the dread must never show."

"I'm not young. What's wrong with that?"

"Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else."

"Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one's place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea - one swims where one wants."

"My parents were French and Irish and our family even has Spanish blood-and I do so love the United States and consider myself part American."

"I never found accents difficult, after learning languages."

Personality

Vivien had a great memory. When Leigh was just a child, her mother played a game from Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim to help develop her memory. She would put objects on a tray, let Leigh study them, and then clear the tray so the child could recreate the tableau. As an adult, Leigh had a near-photographic memory. She knew all her lines after only one or two readings of a play.

Leigh had a troubled personal life as she suffered from manic depression and bipolar disorder her entire adult life, which gravely affected her personal relationships.

Physical Characteristics: Leigh was considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses of her day, and her directors emphasized this in most of her films. When asked if she believed her beauty had been an impediment to being taken seriously as an actress, she said, "People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap, if you really want to look like the part you're playing, which isn't necessarily like you."

Vivien suffered from recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s and ultimately claimed her life at the age of 53.

Interests

• dancing

• Writers

  Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling

Connections

Leigh got married to Herbert Leigh Holman, a barrister, in 1932; he was 13 years older than her. He was against her theatrical endeavors, so Leigh had to leave RADA in the middle. They had a daughter, Suzanne.

She started an affair with Laurence Olivier in 1937. They could not get married as both their spouses refused to give them divorces. In 1940, after finally receiving divorces, Leigh and Olivier got married in Santa Barbara, California. But their marriage was also clouded with problems. They both got divorced in 1960, and she started an affair with actor Jack Merivale. They never got married but stayed together until her death.

Father:

Ernest Hartley

(1884–1962)

Mother:

Gertrude Mary Frances

(1888-1972)

Partner:

John Herman Merivale

(1 December 1917 – 6 February 1990)

John Herman Merivale was a British theatre actor, and occasional supporting player in British films.

ex-spouse:

Herbert Leigh Holman

(1900 - 8 February 1982)

ex-spouse:

Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier

(22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989)

Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. Late in his career, he had considerable success in television roles.

Daughter:

Suzanne Farrington

(10 October 1933 – 1 March 2015)

Suzanne Farrington was the only child of Vivien Leigh and her first husband, Herbert Leigh Holman. Upon her mother's death, Farrington was bequeathed her mother's papers, including her letters, photographs, contracts and diaries.

Collegue :

Clark Gable

(1 February 1901 – 16 November 1960)

Clark Gable was an American film actor and military officer, often referred to as "The King of Hollywood" or just simply as "The King".

Collegue :

Olivia de Havilland

(b. 1 July 1916)

Olivia de Havilland is a British-American former actress, whose career spanned from 1935 to 1988.

References

• Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait Vivien Leigh's mystique was a combination of staggering beauty, glamour, romance, and genuine talent displayed in her Oscar-winning performances in Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. For more than thirty years, her name alone sold out theaters and cinemas the world over, and she inspired many of the greatest visionaries of her time: Laurence Olivier loved her; Winston Churchill praised her; Christian Dior dressed her.
  2013
• Vivien Leigh: Actress and icon This edited volume provides new readings of the life and career of iconic actress Vivien Leigh.
  2018
• Vivien Leigh: A Biography This is the story of the actress who became a Hollywood legend by winning the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, and whose circle included both theatrical and political celebrities, from Winston Churchill to Noel Coward, John Gielgud, and Marlon Brando.
  2013
• Dark Star: A Biography of Vivien Leigh
  2018
• Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh
  1987
• The Illumination of Vivien Leigh: A Time-Traveller's Memoir Even as a child, Michèle Bardeaux remembered another incarnation, yet kept this almost exclusively to herself for most of her life. Until a series of inspirations impelled her to share her experience and tell her story first-hand, from the perspective of Spiritual Illumination. In this stunning memoir, she explores the Spiritual Purpose behind her past and present lives, and her reasons for reincarnating so quickly.
  2013