As the ravishing star of the greatest movie of all time

As the ravishing star of the greatest movie of all time, she had the world at her feet. Yet this haunted heroine struggled all her life to be recognised for her talent rather than her looks, and to hide the dark secret that shadowed her.
By Fiona Daniels

As the flames leapt into the LA sky, it seemed as if all Hollywood was alight. The man watching the 14314w2214o spectacle wondered gloomily if it was his career he was seeing go up in smoke. Two long years had passed since he'd embarked on his dream movie and he had no script, no scenes - and no heroine. But tonight, all that was about to change. Hearing footsteps, he turned from the fire and his heart skipped a beat. Before him stood a ravishing woman with a mass of black hair, a heart-shaped face, magnolia-white skin and feline blue-green eyes. "Hey, genius, " called his brother, standing triumphantly beside her. "Meet your Scarlett O'Hara. "

Vivien Leigh was just 25 when she took the most coveted role in movie history, and the story of how she met producer David O Selznick is almost as famous as Gone With The Wind itself. It was the night of December 10, 1938, and Selznick, ready to start filming Margaret Mitchell's epic tale of love and war, was burning old sets on the back lot of his movie studio to make way for the elaborate new set to be built. He'd decided to film the fire, the towering flames becoming the "burning of Atlanta" - a pivotal moment in the story. His soon-to-be leading lady couldn't have chosen a better moment for her entrance.

Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner... America's biggest stars were all vying for the part, so no-one expected an unknown English actress to steal it out from under them. Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was outraged: "Out of millions of American women, [Selznick] couldn't find one to suit him, " she wrote. "I'm sure millions of Americans will stay away from the picture in protest. "

Hopper's prophecy couldn't have been more wrong - 1939's Gone With The Wind became a worldwide box-office hit, the highest grossing film of all time, and catapulted Vivien Leigh into stardom. Like Scarlett, Vivien was charming and driven; she knew what she wanted and how to get it. She entranced everyone she met and pursued the love of her life, actor Laurence Olivier, with the same single-minded passion with which she sought the role.

But also like Scarlett, she would endure many trials. The grand affair she ignited with Olivier would one day burn itself out. Behind the scenes, she battled mental and physical illness, suffering bipolar disease and tuberculosis, braving years of hospitalisation and crude treatment, even performing with the burn marks from shock therapy still on her temples. However, while her spirit never surrendered, her body let her down. She lost the fight in 1967, aged 53, although her legend would live on forever.

Born Vivian Mary Hartley on November 5, 1913, in Darjeeling, India, she was the only child of well-off parents enjoying a privileged life at the British outpost. Her father, Ernest Hartley, was a Yorkshireman who'd come to India eight years earlier. There, he'd landed work as an exchange broker and met and married Gertrude Yackjee, a stunning Irish woman whose rumoured Armenian or Parsee-Indian heritage may have contributed to Vivian's famed exotic looks. The pampered young girl was encouraged by her mother to read and create a world of make-believe. It must have come as a shock then, at age six, to find herself uprooted in 1920 to the cold, isolated reality of an English convent school, where she'd remain for the next eight years. Despite her loneliness, Vivian became a favourite with the nuns and the girls. Graceful and talented, she studied ballet, cello and piano, and it was here her ambition to act emerged, as she appeared in school plays and accompanied her mother to the theatre.

Actress Mia Farrow, whose mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, was at school with her, recounts, "The seven-year-old Vivian told my mother she was going to be famous. " Upon leaving the convent, she set about pursuing her goal - after a few years at finishing schools in Italy, France and Germany, she returned to England in 1931 and studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA).

Her determination to succeed as an actress was matched by her determination in love, and when Vivian set her sights on handsome lawyer Herbert Leigh Holman, he found himself helpless before her. The two were married in December 1932 and, to Vivian's dismay, she soon fell pregnant, giving birth to daughter Suzanne in 1933. "I felt too young to be the mother of a child, " she complained. "You cannot be calm with all your life still before you, and your ambitions unfulfilled. "

Despite Holman's protests, Vivian hired a nanny and returned to RADA, after which she rarely saw her daughter, who would grow up mostly with Holman and Vivian's mother. Destiny was calling and, in 1935, she got her first big role in the period play The Mask Of Virtue. The reviews she received set the tone for years to come, as critics were guarded about her skills but lauded her beauty. For her part, Vivian knew her flaws, thinking her hands too big, her mouth too small and her neck too long when, as she later admitted, "I should have been worrying about my acting. "

But there was no doubt that a fresh talent had arrived. She changed the spelling of her first name to Vivien and, ironically, took on her husband's middle name even as she began to have affairs - one with producer Alexander Korda, with whom she signed a contract.

The night she saw stage idol Laurence Olivier perform, Vivien announced to a friend, "That's the man I'm going to marry. " She was 20, he was 27. Vivien wangled an introduction when he was dining with his wife at London's Savoy Grill, then visited him one afternoon in his dressing room, coyly dropping a kiss on his shoulder in passing. "My father said as soon as he set eyes on her, he felt darkly disturbed, " reveals Olivier's son Tarquin.

So began one of the world's most famous love affairs. For two years, the pair enjoyed furtive liaisons, also embarking on an intoxicating acting partnership that mirrored their real-life romance. They played thwarted lovers in the film Fire Over England (1937), doomed lovers on stage in Hamlet in the same year, and illicit lovers on celluloid again in 21 Days (1940). Vivien recalled, "I don't remember sleeping, ever; only every precious moment that we spent together. " But such intensity could not remain secret - they eventually left their spouses and set up home in London.

During this time, the talk everywhere was of Gone With The Wind and who would play its spirited heroine, Scarlett O'Hara. Vivien was convinced she'd be perfect, and with Olivier already in the US filming Wuthering Heights, she headed for Hollywood, "partly because Larry's there, and partly because I intend to get the part of Scarlett O'Hara". She visited Olivier's American agent, who just so happened to be producer David O Selznick's brother, and who famously asked her, "Want to come to a fire? "

"Vivien and Scarlett were first cousins in my opinion, " mused her LA assistant. "They were both cunning, conniving and manipulative. Vivien knew how to get what she wanted and she usually did. " She may have got her way, but the actress was in for a gruelling 122 days of filming, working six-day weeks with only a few hours sleep a night. Banned by Selznick from living with Olivier in order to maintain a moral front, Vivien was very lonely and unhappy. She hated kissing co-star Clark Gable because of his false teeth and whisky breath, and she fought constantly with director Victor Fleming. Finally, six months later, it was over and motion picture history was made. At the 1940 Academy Awards, Gone With The Wind took out eight Oscars - more than any film to that day - and Vivien was proclaimed Best Actress.

She had proven her talent and won the man of her dreams, marrying Olivier on August 31, 1940, after their divorces came through. But the struggle to maintain all she'd acquired would be an even greater challenge, and success came at the expense of her health. On the set of Caesar And Cleopatra, Vivien fell badly in the early stages of pregnancy, suffering the first of two miscarriages the actress would have in her life. Refusing to rest, she commenced her finest stage performance in The Skin Of Our Teeth, but it was cut short when medical tests revealed a tubercular patch on her lung in 1945. After a time in hospital, she spent the next nine months recuperating at Notley Abbey, the historic English country house she and Olivier had bought.

Outwardly they were the golden couple, entertaining fellow actors with riotous parties that would continue into the early hours, presided over by an ever-active Vivien. Charming, well read, witty and considerate, she was the perfect hostess and loved by all. But her mood swings were becoming more dramatic and frequent, alternating between bursts of frenetic energy and bouts of deep depression. And, all this time, she witnessed her husband's career reach stellar heights.

"When he had this marvellous success, she felt she had to keep up with him, which was a big strain, " commented their peer, actor John Gielgud. Actress and friend Maxine Audley observed, "People would say to Larry, 'You are the greatest actor in the world', and they would turn to Vivien and say, 'You are the most beautiful woman in the world. '"

The cracks started to show on a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1948, during which Olivier "knew that Vivien was lost to me". On their return to England, she told him, probably during a bout of depression, "I don't love you anymore", although it would be some time before the couple's problems became public. Instead, Vivien astounded London audiences as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire. Over 326 performances, Vivien relived Blanche's descent into madness, coming off stage shaking. In the 1951 film version, she delivered an equally harrowing performance, for which, at age 38, she won her second Oscar.

On the surface it was a triumph, but the damage had been done, and Vivien suffered a nervous breakdown in 1952. She was determined to continue acting, playing an acclaimed Lady Macbeth opposite her husband in 1955. With tragic duality, the crumbling of the Macbeths' marriage reflected the couple's own failing relationship. The pair were "trapped by public acclaim, scrabbling about in the cold ashes of a physical passion that burnt itself out years ago", according to playwright Noel Coward. Olivier, who had begun an affair with actress Joan Plowright, separated from Vivien in 1957, divorcing her in 1960.

The next few years were lonely ones, but Vivien didn't give in. She mastered a new genre - the musical comedy - receiving a Tony Award for her role in 1963's Tovarich. In the midst of more hospital visits, she had found a new and devoted companion in the form of stage actor John "Jack" Merivale, who loved her but knew he would never replace Olivier in her heart. He performed opposite Vivien in the play The Lady Of The Camellias, ironically about a woman dying of consumption. When Vivien was diagnosed with another tubercular patch on the lung, she refused hospital treatment, melancholically declaring that she'd "rather have lived a short life with Larry than face a long life without him". Sadly, her wish was granted, and she died, aged 53, on July 8, 1967, of complications from tuberculosis.

Tributes came flooding in, and the stars of stage and screen gathered to farewell her in memorial services the world over. But it was on the day after her death that Vivien was paid the greatest honour. For one hour, the theatres in London's West End switched their lights off - the ultimate mark of respect.

"I have always believed that if you want something with all your heart and soul you get it, " Vivien once proclaimed. Finally, the woman Tennessee Williams called "a definition of loveliness" was recognised as the actress she had always yearned to be.