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Vivien Leigh (November 5, 1913–July 7, 1967) was an
English actress who was born
Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, India. She and her parents later moved to England, where young
Leigh grew up. She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton,
England, along with fellow actress-to-be Maureen
O'Sullivan.
She was married in 1932 to Herbert Leigh Holman, and they had a daughter, Suzanne, in
1933.
Leigh's career began on the stage. Her first play was The Green Sash, though it was Mask of Virtue that
really brought her to stardom. In 1935, she began her film career with such
movies as The Village Squire, Things are Looking Up, and Look Up and Laugh. Leigh is best known,
however, for her role of Scarlett O'Hara in the American film
Gone With the Wind (1939), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress .
In 1940, Leigh arranged for a divorce from Holman and married British theatre star
Laurence Olivier. The pair had met in 1935 and had begun a rather
public love affair. At the time, both were married (Olivier to actress Jill Esmond who was pregnant when the affair began.).
In 1944, the actress was diagnosed as having a tuberculosis patch on her left lung. Though she continued her career with such plays as Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth, and the
1946 film Caesar and Cleopatra, her illness was getting worse. In 1951, however, Leigh won a second Academy Award
for her portrayal of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar
Named Desire.
By the early 1960s Leigh had suffered two miscarriages, and the severity of the tuberculosis was incapacitating. She had also been plagued by manic-depression for some time. In 1960, she and Olivier divorced on supposedly friendly terms. Leigh continued to keep a framed photograph of him on her
bedside table, even while living with her companion, actor John Merivale. Joan Plowright, third
wife and widow of Olivier, later claimed that during much of Olivier's marriage to Leigh he was having a longterm homosexual relationship with the American actor Danny Kaye.
The actress died of chronic tuberculosis in her London home. She was cremated and
her ashes were scattered on the lake at Tickerage Mill, near Blackboys, Sussex, London, England.
Leigh has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at
6773 Hollywood Blvd.
Filmography
- Things Are Looking Up (1934)
- The Village Squire (1935)
- Gentleman's Agreement (1935)
- Look Up And Laugh (1935)
- Fire Over
England (1937)
- Dark Journey (1937)
- Storm In A Teacup (1937)
- Twenty-One Days (1937)
- A Yank At Oxford (1938)
- St. Martins Lane (1938)
- Gone With the Wind (1939)
- Waterloo Bridge (1940)
- That Hamilton
Woman (1941)
- Caeser and
Cleopatra (1945)
- Anna Karenina (1947)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
- The Deep Blue Sea (1955)
- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961)
- Ship of Fools (1965)
External links
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