Vivien Leigh

"When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people." - Vivien Leigh

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Fragments of outtakes from the scene where Robert Taylor’s character proposes to Vivien Leigh’s in 1940′s Waterloo Bridge. These frames didn’t appear in the final movie.

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Lyn Seymour feeding ice-cream to his Anne Boleyn, Vivien Leigh, at a performance of Henry VIII at Regent’s Park, 1936

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Vivien Leigh, 1941

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From left to right, producer David Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Victor Fleming, Sam Wood and Carole Lombard, all celebrating the wrap of Gone With the Wind at a wrap party.

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Leigh fiercely resisted the idea that she was playing variations on the same character. In a TV interview done late in her life, she acknowledged that both Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche DuBois were vulnerable Southern women, but that was as far as the similarity went. “They were entirely different people to me,” Leigh protested. “They were both knocked around quite a bit but one overcame the knocking around and the other succumbed. Therefore, they were innately different it seemed to me.“ Leigh spoke of her desire to play as many different roles as possible. “I think typecasting is one of the menaces, really, because you get used to what someone is going to do and then it holds no surprise for you.” The irony is that she only played Southern belles two or three times (in Gone with the Wind, Streetcar and in her final film, Ship of Fools) but did so with such searing conviction that no-one could imagine her as anything else. x

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Friends and Family of Vivien’s recall her as always knowing the exact thing to say to make you feel at ease, to render your insecurities ebbed, but she wasn’t able to reassure herself in a similar way. Photographer Cecil Beaton recalled, during the making of Anna Karenina, the phobia she was gaining about her appearance: “It is not at all what she would like. It has deteriorated and appalls her. Each photograph shown to her is further confirmation of her fears. She is always seeking to be in a dark light- muffled up in veils and furs.” 

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Gone With The Wind (1939)

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“Waterloo Bridge”(1940).

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Clark Gable & Vivien Leigh ~ Gone With The Wind, 1939

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Vivien always worked hard, at one time coping with a twenty-four-hour day and then returning to a new scene after a mere four hours of sleep. Cammie King, who played Scarlett’s child in the film, reported that Vivien had gotten so tired by a certain point in the filming that she needed to be physically carried from one scene to another.

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Vivien Leigh in Sidewalks of London (1938)

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“Vivien, above all else, is incomparably graceful, she moves like a marvelous dancer, on or off stage.” – Tennessee Williams

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“I don’t know of any other movie to have that intensity of that love-hate, attraction-repulsion that you have there. That whole series of misoppourtnities and miscues when one is ready for the other, and the other is not ready, it’s just so painful.“ -Molly Haskell

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"The Indian Amah who looked after me told me that one day a handsome prince would descend from these mountains. He'd be secorted by snow leopards. My prince would take me away into the snowy sky and make me his beautiful princess. All my gowns would be made of spun gold, and my prince and would live happily ever after". — Vivien Leigh

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