Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh, born Vivian Mary Hartley on 5 November 1913 in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India, was a British actress whose stage and screen career spanned three decades. The only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker born in Scotland in 1882, and Gertrude Mary Frances Hartley, born in Darjeeling in 1888, Leigh made her first stage appearance at age three, reciting "Little Bo Peep" for her mother's amateur theatre group. She was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, Middlesex, where one of her schoolmates was future actress Maureen O'Sullivan, and later attended schools in Dinard, Biarritz, San Remo, and Paris, becoming fluent in French and Italian. After the family returned to Britain in 1931, her father enrolled her at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She married barrister Herbert Leigh Holman on 20 December 1932 and left RADA, and on 12 October 1933 gave birth to a daughter, Suzanne Holman.

Leigh's professional career began with an uncredited film appearance in Things Are Looking Up, followed by a credited role in The Mask of Virtue in 1935, directed by Sydney Carroll. The production drew strong reviews and attracted the attention of producer Alexander Korda, who signed her to a film contract. It was in the playbill for that production that the spelling of her first name was revised to "Vivien." She met Laurence Olivier in the autumn of 1935 and the two began an affair while filming Fire Over England in 1937. Leigh and Olivier married in 1940 and remained husband and wife until 1960, during which time she was styled Lady Olivier. They appeared together in numerous stage productions, with Olivier frequently directing, and in three films. Despite her relative inexperience at the time, Leigh was cast as Ophelia opposite Olivier's Hamlet in an Old Vic Theatre production staged at Elsinore, Denmark.

Her screen work brought her two Academy Awards for Best Actress: the first for her portrayal of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind in 1939, and the second for her performance as Blanche DuBois in the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. For the latter performance she additionally received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Leigh 16th on its list of the greatest female movie stars of classic Hollywood cinema. Throughout her career she played a wide range of stage roles, including Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet, and Lady Macbeth, as well as heroines in works by Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw.

Leigh's Broadway career extended from 1940 to 1966 and encompassed productions including Antony and Cleopatra, Caesar and Cleopatra, Duel of Angels, Ivanov, and Tovarich. Her performance in the musical version of Tovarich earned her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1963. For much of her life Leigh contended with recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s, a condition that contributed to periods of inactivity in her career. She died on 8 July 1967 at the age of 53.