Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967), was an English actress. She won two Academy Awards for playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End.

She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her thirty-year stage career, she played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress, but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult life, she gained a reputation for being a difficult person to work with, and her career went through periods of decline.

She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in 1960, and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis, in 1967.

Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, to Ernest Hartley, a British Officer in the Indian Cavalry, and Gertrude Robinson Yackje, whose heritage is in question. They were married in Kensington, London in Vivian Hartley made her first stage appearance at the age of three. Vivian Hartley completed her later education in Europe, returning to her parents in England in She discovered that one of Maureen O'Sullivan's films was playing in London's West End and told her parents of her ambitions to become an actress. Both were highly supportive, and her father helped her enroll at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. In late 1931, she met Herbert Leigh Holman, known as Leigh, a barrister thirteen years her senior. Despite his disapproval of "theatrical people", they were married on 20 December 1932, and upon their marriage she terminated her studies at RADA. On 12 October 1933, she gave birth to a daughter,Suzanne.

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