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vivien leigh (1913-1967)
biography
gone with the wind
olivia de havilland
greta garbo
alfred hitchcock
richard attenborough
isabelle adjani |
leigh
[ v i v i e n l e i g h : b i o g ]
"Vivien, I've just read a great story for the movies about the bitchiest of all bitches, and you're just the person to play the part."
Did You Know?
Birth name:
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Remembered For?
That, at least, is the story of how Vivien Leigh came to be cast in the role coveted or claimed at one time or another by every rising, established or waning female star in Hollywood. Perhaps the only exceptions were Barbara Stanwyck (who was aware her screen persona made her unsuitable for the part) and Hedy Lamarr (whose Viennese accent cancelled her out).
The carefully orchestrated search ended in a coup de theatre with the relevation that
an English actress, with only a few films to her credit, was to play the Southern heroine of the the novel that, since 1936, had outsold the bible in the USA. The fact that Vivien Leigh was not American failed to outrage the many Scarlett O'Hara fans in the Deep South; the unforgivable miscasting would have been to let a Yankee play the role!
The Truth about Scarlett?
Her achievement still stands, even if there remains doubt as to how she came to play the role. Another version of the story is that Victor Saville, the British director who directed Leigh in Storm in a Teacup (1937) rang her London flat one day and said:
Resolved to try for the part of Scarlett, Leigh followed Laurence Olivier - then her paramour, later her husband - to California, where he was to play Heathcliff in Samuel Goldwyn's production of Wuthering Heights (1939).
The English Rose of Hollywood
At 26 she became a priceless commodity in the industry. David O. Selznick, the sole proprietor of her contract, doled her talents out parsimoniously: first to MGM for Waterloo Bridge (1940), then to Alexander Korda, who had originally discovered Leigh in Britain, for That Hamilton Woman! (1941). There followed an absence from screen dictated by war and sickness. She reappeared as Bernard Shaw's Egyptian kitten of a queen in Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), looking ravaged and mature enough to play Shakespeare's Cleopatra.
She was Tennessee Williams' own choice for the part of Blanche DuBois in his play A Streetcar Named Desire. The play was filmed in 1951, and this time Leigh's Southern drawl was so convincing that it seemed to issue from a dark bruised recess of her being. A sense of inevitable decline is captured in the curtain line: 'After all, I've always depended on the kindness of stranger' - a melancholy echo of that other famous exit line 'After all, tomorrow is another day', which summed up the headstrong, vixenish, egotistical Scarlett.
Living close to the edge
Various screen tests for Scarltt have survived and been screened: Leigh's has disappeared into some clandestine collection, but we have Cukor's word that no-one, not even Leigh herself during the actual shooting of the film, could match her miraculously intuitive approach on that first brush with the part.
Vivien Leigh's own life had been one of extremes. Born in 1913 in India, separated in childhood from her mother, she struggled with depression and hysteria before contracting tuberculosis. She fought the disease throughout her life until finally succumbing to it in 1967. But these bare facts do not explain her peculiar 'poetic' nervousness.
Tennessee Williams celebrated a certain breed of women as 'ladies who died when love was lost'. This definition, though it misses Scarlett, encompassess Blanche, Anna Karenina, Mrs Stone and Mrs Mary Treadwell of Ship of Fools, and may stand as a fitting, if melancholy, epitath for Vivien Leigh herself.
1935 - Things Are Looking Up 1935 - The Village Squire 1935 - Gentleman's Agreement 1935 - Look up and Laugh
1937 - Fire Over England 1937 - Dark Journey 1937 - Storm in a Teacup
1938 - A Yank At Oxford
1939 - St Martins Lane 1939 - Gone With The Wind
1940 - Waterloo Bridge
1941 - That Hamilton Woman
1945 - Caesar and Cleopatra
1948 - Anna Karenina
1951 - A Streetcar Named Desire
1955 - The Deep Blue Sea
1961 - The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
1965 - Ship of Fools
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Page created by: lenin@netcomuk.co.uk Changes last made: 2004 | ||