In the spotlight…..

Vivien Leigh 1913 – 1967  “You know the passage where Scarlett voices her       happiness that her mother is dead, so that she      can’t see what a bad girl Scarlett has become?                        Well, that’s me!”

Vivien at age 3 1/2

Vivian spent her first six years in the family mansion outside Calcutta where she was never far from her mother’s side even though they had servants and an English nanny. It was Gertrude who saw that she learned to read and write and always knew her catechism. Vivian was both beautiful and smart even at this early age. At age 3 1/2 the little lady gave her first stage performance as “Bo Peep” in a children’s pageant in front of the governor’s wife and her ladies. But when it came Vivian’s turn, she had changed her role to suit herself. Tapping her shepherd’s staff for attention. she announced firmly “I won’t sing. I will recite”. When she was six, it was time for her parents to plan her formal education. It was the custom of wealthy English families in India to send their children home to proper English boarding schools. Gertrude chose the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton  just outside London and, in 1920, the Hartleys sailed for England. Vivian wouldn’t see the country of her birth for another 45 years.
                      

Ernest Hartley, Vivian's father

Vivian with her mother, Gertrude

 
The strict school regimen didn’t daunt Vivian one bit. Her mother, also a product of convent education , had trained her well. Every minute of her waking time was planned and supervised. But the little charmer did manage to win over the Reverend Mother who let her keep a kitten with her in the dormitory. She still talked about her ambition to be “a great actress” and it was seconded by her new school chum who had the same goals. Maureen O’Sullivan would later share the screen with her in “A Yank at Oxford”.

The Hartley-Holman wedding

Vivian was only 18 and a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) when she met and married 35-year-old attorney Herbert Leigh Holman. Her father felt she made a great choice, her mother was apprehensive. They were married on December 20, 1932 less than a year after they met. But Vivian’s training at RADA ended in the early summer of 1933 when she found out she was pregnant. Suzanne Holman was born a month early on October 12, 1933. “That was a very messy business. I don’t think I’ll do it again in a hurry.” Unlike her own mother, Vivian was back at work planning her career soon after the baby’s birth.

She hired John Gliddon, a former actor and show business journalist to be her business manager. His first order of business was to change her name….Vivien with an ‘e’ and her husband’s first name as her last name. Leigh Holman was not pleased with any of it but realized there was no way he could ever dissuade  Vivien. Gliddon expertly guided Vivien through the proper exposure and the proper play and film choices to a 1935 breakout stage role in “The Mask of Virtue”. The Daily Mail crowed “A new young British star…arose on the British stage last night with a  spectacular suddenness that set playgoers cheering with suppressed delight.” Interviews with the new sensation began appearing in all the papers. “So many actresses tell you they just love washing dishes. I just don’t believe it. I hate sloppy things.” Two days after the opening Gliddon negotiated a 5 year contract for Vivien with Alexander Korda at £35,700  with 6 months off every year to do a play.

As fate would have it there was another actor currently under contract to Korda…his name was Laurence Olivier.

Even before Vivien and Larry met there was admiration on both sides. “What a virile performance!” Vivien said of his role in “Theatre Royal”. Larry was even more descriptive after seeing “The Mask of Virtue”. He told friends she was “an attraction of the most perturbing nature I have ever encountered.” When Olivier played dual roles in “Romeo and Juliet” in the fall of 1935 Vivien was in the audience almost every night. Finally she managed to get backstage to meet him and the passion that was ignited would last over 20 years.

"Fire Over England" 1936

Finally Korda found a film for both of them. While the stars found the script lacking in some ways, they really wanted to work together. For the moment neither Vivien or Larry seemed to remember that they were married to others and that Larry was about to become a father. The love scenes on the set mirrored the intensity of those off the set. “Fire over England” caused a furor on both sides of the ocean. Meanwhile Gertrude and Leigh took care of little Suzanne and in late August, 1936 Jill Esmond Olivier gave birth to a son, Simon Tarquin Olivier. Vivien attended the christening.

Larry and Vivien at the Oscars

In late 1937 Vivien and Larry set up housekeeping together. Vivien had her heart set on the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” ever since she read the book...but Korda wouldn’t let her test for it. By the summer of 1938 Olivier was leaving to do Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights’ for MGM with Merle Oberon as Cathy. The studio wanted Vivien to do Isabella but she refused. Larry left without her only to write home repeatedly about his loneliness. Vivien left play rehearsals to join him for a week and ended up staying for over a year…. because she finally won the role of Scarlett and her first Oscar! Larry was also an Oscar nominee for “Wuthering Heights” but lost to Robert Donat that year.

In January 1939 Leigh Holman divorced Vivian Mary Hartley and two weeks later Jill Esmond Olivier gave Larry his freedom. It would take 6 months before the decrees were final. So at one minute past midnight on August 20, 1940 Olivier and Leigh became Mr. and Mrs. Olivier in a ceremony that lasted 5 minutes. When the news reached the Convent of the Sacred Heart, pupils at early morning Mass were asked to pray for "the soul of our old child Vivian Mary Hartley” who had married outside the faith.

...as Cleopatra

Two days after Christmas, 1940 the Oliviers returned home to England to find it battered but brave. Larry set out to pile up flight hours before joining the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air arm. Vivien tried to become a stay-at-home wartime wife but, when he saw that depressed her, Larry suggested she do a play instead. The play “Doctor’s Dilemma” opened in London on March of 1942 with great reviews and had a run of 13 months. But during that time Vivien suffered a miscarriage. In mid-July.1944 while filming “Caesar and Cleopatra” she suffered another miscarriage and this one was followed by a manic depression episode that lasted for weeks. Although she returned to finish the picture and her last scenes were excellent, they weren’t enough to save the film.
 

Notley Abbey

Health problems again took their toll in 1945 during the run of Thornton Wilder’s “Skin of Your Teeth”. Larry was in Paris directing an Old Vic Allied military camp tour when he heard the news…Vivien had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. After six weeks in the hospital, she was forced to spend nine months resting at home. She hadn’t been enamored of Notley Abbey, their greystone manor house in Buckinghamshire, even though Larry loved it, but suddenly she had time to fall in love with the house and became mistress as well as patient with new plans for both inside and out.

On the King’s Birthday, July 8, 1947 Olivier was given a knighthood by King George V but Vivien, experiencing another of her episodes showed no enthusiasm whatever. She dressed all in black for his investiture. On their nine-month tour of Australia and new Zealand that followed, things weren’t much better and Larry was getting very worried. But the year before he had set up his own company Laurence Olivier Productions, Ltd. and was looking for actors while there. Peter Finch became one of his first choices....one he would perhaps regret. He later regarded this tour as the time he began to lose Vivien.
                         

In June, 1950 the couple announced they were off to Hollywood to do two films. Larry was filming “Carrie” and Vivien was doing the screen version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” as Blanche DuBois, the role she played on stage. It would gain her a second Oscar but add to the wear and tear in her mental condition. By early spring, 1955 Larry could see her deteriorating and mistakenly believed that taking the role offered her in “Elephant Walk” would help. It was being filmed partly in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and  take her closer to her childhood home. It was Vivien who suggested Peter Finch as her leading man.

But Ceylon wasn’t the answer. Vivien began an affair with Peter Finch followed by a complete breakdown. Olivier was called and they rushed Vivien home and into the Netherne Psychiatric Hospital while Elizabeth Taylor stepped into the role. After six days of deep sedation and a short recuperative period she was moved to University hospital for electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). But the Vivien that returned home to Larry was a complete stranger.
               

...with Noel Coward

The marriage continued but so did Vivien’s episodes and the on and off affair with Peter Finch. Then, in May 1956, to Noel Coward’s disgust, Vivien announced she was pregnant and had to drop out of his fairly successful play “South Sea Bubble’. She was 42 years old and it was her last chance to have a family with Larry. But five months later she miscarried a little boy. Her manic episodes increased and Larry felt like a helpless onlooker at a tragedy. He accepted the role of Archie Rice in “The Entertainer” but there was no role for Vivien. She was too beautiful to play his wife and too old to play his daughter. That role went to Joan Plowright.

..in the garden in happier times

“Lady Olivier wishes to say that Sir Lawrence has asked her for a divorce in order to marry Miss Joan Plowright. She will naturally do whatever he wishes.” On May 21, 1960 this press release hit the London morning papers like a bomb and all hell broke loose. Joan Plowright had to leave the play she was in to her understudy and literally go into hiding. The divorce itself came on December 2, 1960. Vivien named Joan Plowright as co-respondent. After it was over she went back to work on “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” She wouldn’t work again for 4 years.
                  

...with Jack Merivale in 1960

Vivien kept the Eaton Square apartment and bought a country home in Blackboys, Sussex called Tickerage Mill. An old friend, Jack Merivale, had become her lover and constant companion. He had not known the severity of her mental illness but learned to recognize the signs of coming episodes, when to intervene and when to call for professional help. After “Ship of Fools” wrapped in 1964 she had to go through more ECT treatments. It would be her last film.

Tickerage Mill

In May, 1967 Vivien’s tuberculosis returned with a vengeance and two months later on July 7 she was dead. She was 53 years old.  After calling the doctor, the first one Jack phoned was Larry Olivier who rushed to her deathbed. In his memoirs, Larry confessed “I stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us.”

A service of thanksgiving was held August 13, 1967 at the Trafalgar Square church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The church was filled to capacity long before time for the service.
                                          

There was no Catholic Mass since Vivien Leigh was cremated according to her wishes and her ashes strewn on the old mill pond at Tickerage.  But I am sure at the Convent of the Sacred Heart pupils at the early morning Mass prayed for the little girl who was once Vivian Mary Hartley

For more info see Arabella's Notes