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| Birth Name(s) : Vivian Mary Hartley |
Date of Birth: November 5, 1913 |
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| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Vivien Leigh Biography
Vivien Mary Hartley was born on November 5, 1913 in Darjeeling, India a strange place for one of the world's most celebrated actresses to be born. She was to live in this beautiful country for the next six years. Her parents wanted to come back to England but because of The Great War (W.W.I) they opted to stay in India. At the end of the war the Hartley's headed back to their home country where Vivien's mother wanted her daughter to have a convent education. While there her mother came for a visit and took her to a play on London's legendary West Side. It was there that Vivien decided to become an actress.
At the end of her education, she met and married Herbert Leigh in 1932 and together had a child named Suzanne in 1933. Though she enjoyed motherhood, it did not squelch her ambition to be an actress. Her first role in British motion pictures was as Rose Venables in 1935's Village Squire, The (1935). That same year Vivien appeared in Things Are Looking Up (1935), Look Up and Laugh (1935), and Gentlemen's Agreement (1935). In 1938, Vivien went to the US to see her lover Laurence Olivier who was filming Wuthering Heights (1939) (she had left her husband in 1937).
By the time of the filming of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), her life began to unravel. Vivien had suffered two miscarriages, tuberculosis, and was diagnosed as a manic depressive. However her public was still enthralled with her. She rebounded nicely for her role as Blanche DuBois for her second Oscar winning performance in Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951) opposite Marlon Brando in 1951. She wasn't heard from much after that. She made a film in 1955 (Deep Blue Sea, The (1955)) and didn't appear again until 1961 in Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The (1961). |
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Additional Vivien Leigh Biography
Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, West Bengal, British India, to Ernest Hartley, a British Officer in the Indian Cavalry, and Gertrude Robinson Yackje, whose heritage is in question. She claimed to be of Irish descent, but it is likely that she also had Armenian-Parsee Indian ancestry. They were married in Kensington, London in 1912. In 1917, Ernest Hartley was relocated to Bangalore, while Gertrude and Vivian stayed in Ootacamund. Vivian Hartley made her first stage appearance at the age of three, reciting "Little Bo Peep" for her mother's amateur theatre group. Gertrude Hartley tried to instill in her daughter an appreciation of literature, and introduced her to the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, as well as stories of Greek mythology. An only child, Vivian Hartley was sent to the "Convent of the Sacred Heart" in Roehampton in England, in 1920. Her closest friend at the convent was the future actress Maureen O'Sullivan, to whom she expressed her desire to become "a great actress".
Laurence Olivier saw Leigh in The Mask of Virtue, and a friendship developed after he congratulated her on her performance. While playing lovers in the film Fire Over England (1937), Olivier and Leigh developed a strong attraction, and after filming was completed, they began an affair. During this time Leigh read the Margaret Mitchell novel Gone with the Wind and instructed her American agent to suggest her to David O. Selznick, who was planning a film version. She remarked to a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara", and the film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled a conversation of the same period in which Leigh "stunned us all" with the assertion that Olivier "won't play Rhett Butler, but I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see."
In February 1940, Jill Esmond agreed to divorce Olivier, and Holman also agreed to divorce Leigh, although they maintained a strong friendship for the rest of Leigh's life. Esmond was granted custody of Tarquin, her son with Olivier, and Holman was granted custody of Suzanne, his daughter with Leigh. On August 30 Olivier and Leigh were married in Santa Barbara, California, in a ceremony attended only by their witnesses, Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin.
In 1947 Olivier was knighted, and Leigh accompanied him to Buckingham Palace for the investiture. She became Lady Olivier, a title she continued to use after their divorce, until she died.
By 1948 Olivier was on the Board of Directors for the Old Vic Theatre, and he and Leigh embarked on a tour of Australia and New Zealand to raise funds for the theatre. During their six-month tour, Olivier performed Richard III and also performed with Leigh in The School for Scandal and The Skin of Our Teeth. The tour was an outstanding success, and although Leigh was plagued with insomnia and allowed her understudy to replace her for a week while she was ill, she generally withstood the demands placed upon her, with Olivier noting her ability to "charm the press." Members of the company later recalled several quarrels between the couple, the most dramatic occurring in Christchurch when Leigh refused to go onstage. Olivier slapped her face, and Leigh slapped him in return and swore at him before she made her way to the stage. By the end of the tour, both were exhausted and ill, and Olivier told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later he would comment that he "lost Vivien" in Australia.
As a result of this episode, many of the Oliviers' friends learned of her problems. David Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad", and in his diary Noel Coward expressed surprise that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts."
Kenneth Tynan ridiculed Leigh's performance opposite Olivier in the 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, commenting that she "receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber." He was one of several critics to react negatively to her reinterpretation of Lady Macbeth in 1955, saying that her performance was insubstantial and lacked the necessary fury demanded of the role; however, after her death he revised his opinion, describing his earlier criticism as "one of the worst errors of judgement" he had ever made. He came to believe that Leigh's interpretation, in which Lady Macbeth uses her sexual allure to keep Macbeth enthralled, "made more sense ... than the usual battle-axe" portrayal of the character. In a survey of theatre critics conducted shortly after Leigh's death, several named it as one of her greatest achievements in theatre.
The British Library in London purchased the papers of Laurence Olivier from his estate in 1999. Known as The Laurence Olivier Archive, the collection includes many of Vivien Leigh's personal papers, including numerous letters written by her to Olivier. The papers of Vivien Leigh, including letters, photographs, contracts and diaries, are owned by her daughter, Mrs Suzanne Farrington. In 1994 the National Library of Australia purchased a photograph album, monogrammed "L & V O" and believed to have belonged to the Oliviers, containing 573 photographs of the couple during their 1948 tour of Australia. It is now held as part of the record of the history of the performing arts in Australia. |
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| It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh. |
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