Two Oscars, yet she insisted the stage came first
Vivien Leigh (1913–1967), born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, won Best Actress Oscars as Scarlett O’Hara (1939) and Blanche DuBois. For thirty years she treated film as a sideline to Coward, Shaw, and Shakespeare—Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth—while tuberculosis shadowed her final decades.
The only child of broker Ernest Hartley and Gertrude (of Armenian and Irish ancestry), she recited Little Bo Peep onstage at three for her mother’s amateur group. In 1932 she married barrister Herbert Leigh Holman, left RADA, and bore daughter Suzanne in 1933. Extra work in Things Are Looking Up led agent John Gliddon to reshape her name; Alexander Korda first dismissed her potential, then casting and notices for The Mask of Virtue flooded her with praise she later called a foolish burden she needed years to deserve.
An affair with Laurence Olivier began while both were married and co-starring in Fire Over England (1937); they later wed (1940–1960) and shared stage work plus three films. Hollywood’s Scarlett search looked elsewhere until Myron Selznick pressed her case. David Selznick found her too British after Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford, yet she flew to Los Angeles, won the part, and endured Victor Fleming replacing George Cukor—while she and Olivia de Havilland still sought Cukor’s private coaching on nights and weekends.
AFI later ranked her the sixteenth-greatest female classic star. Chronic tuberculosis, diagnosed by the mid-1940s, and a reputation for difficult behavior marked later years; she died at fifty-three on 8 July 1967. The paradox remains: global fame from two screen roles, while she measured herself against the harder craft of nightly theatre and classical verse.
Source: Vivien Leigh
