Ruth Leon recommends… Vivien Leigh – Scarlett and Blanche

Vivien Leigh was born on 5th November in 1913. Winner of two Oscars and a Tony, the veteran of many stage roles from Shakespeare to Shaw, including Juliet and Lady Macbeth, she was a better actor than she was given credit for.

​Her extraordinary beauty, like that of Elizabeth Taylor and Hedy Lamarr, obscured the quality of her talent and underestimated her ability to work hard and fight hard for what she wanted.

Her reputation rests on two roles, for both of which she won her Oscars. Producer David Selznik considered more than 1400 actors and screen-tested 90 during the two-year search for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind but Vivien wanted it and, although he was initially sceptical because she was British and unknown, he was convinced, first by her determination and then by her screen-test.

The other was her Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Despite many other interesting interpretations which have followed, hers is the definitive Blanche, a damaged Southern belle, drowning in her own fears and insecurities.

Leigh herself was bi-polar, undiagnosed for much of her life, an illness which gave her the reputation of being impossible to work with and finally broke up her marriage to Laurence Olivier who had tried hard to find a cure for her moods and tantrums but finally opted for an easier, less stressful life with Joan Plowright.

I met her once, in 1961 when she was filming The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone and, although we didn’t know it, dying of the tuberculosis that would kill her 5 years later. She was so thin that I thought she’d disappear into a puff of smoke in front of me, and still so beautiful that I instantly understood why Laurence Olivier had said of her, “I couldn’t help myself with Vivien. No man could.”
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She died in 1967, a sad and diminished figure but still almost impossibly beautiful.

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