*Includes pictures.
*Includes quotes about Vivien's life and career, including her own
quotes.
*Includes a bibliography for further reading.
"I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a
false life, lived for fake values and for publicity." - Vivien
Leigh
A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most
influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the
trees? In Charles River Editors' British Legends series, readers
can get caught up to speed on the lives of Britain's most important
men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while
learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.
The 1930s were the height of the classical Hollywood era, and it
is no accident that 1939 has historically been designated as the
pinnacle of Hollywood film history. The era was known for its
lavish studio productions, with MGM, RKO, Warner Brothers,
Paramount, and 20th Century Fox all operating at the height of
their powers. Every major studio possessed a long roster of
contract players, with films released at such a rapid pace that it
made for an especially competitive environment within the industry.
Even while America remained in the throes of the Great Depression,
the film industry continued to flourish, and movies easily
supplanted the theater as the main attraction for American
entertainment.
Of course, what made 1939 the watershed year was the release of
several critically acclaimed movies, including The Wizard of Oz and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But the most famous of the bunch, and
perhaps the most famous movie of all, is Gone With the Wind, and
one of the most remarkable aspects of the film is that the
quintessential Southern belle was played by Vivien Leigh, a British
actress still relatively unknown in Hollywood. Vivien was an
accomplished stage actress and had already appeared in foreign
films during the 1930s, but she was a complete dark horse to get
the iconic role she's still associated with, and it only came about
because of her persistence in getting cast for the role. 30 years
after Gone With the Wind was released, one film critic credited
Selznick's "inspired casting" of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett with the
film's success. Another 30 years later, the same critic wrote that
Leigh "still lives in our minds and memories as a dynamic force
rather than as a static presence."
While Gone With the Wind made Leigh a big name practically
overnight, she continued to buck the usual trend by doing Broadway
and even appearing on stage in London during the 1940s, instead of
focusing on movies. A lot of this was no doubt due to her famous
marriage to Laurence Olivier, himself an accomplished stage and
film actor. At the same time, Vivien became notorious for being
difficult to work with and unusually temperamental, a byproduct of
bipolar disorder that frequently affected her mood and occasionally
left her incoherently hysterical.
Nevertheless, Vivien was able to recapture the magic in 1951's A
Streetcar Named Desire, which cast her in the role of Southern
belle yet again. Phyllis Harnoll praised Leigh's Blanche DuBois by
saying that, in the London stage production of the play, she
showed, "proof of greater powers as an actress than she had
hitherto shown." In fact, it was actually during her time as DuBois
that she reached the pinnacle of her stage career. Likewise, her
role in the movie was described as one "of the greatest
performances ever put on film" and "one of those rare performances
that can truly be said to evoke both fear and pity."
Unfortunately, her life and career faced constant upheaval by both
her mental and physical maladies, including tuberculosis, which led
to a premature death in 1967. British Legends: The Life and Legacy
of Vivien Leigh examines the life and career of one of Hollywood's
most famous actresses.
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