New details about Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s private letters.
HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN COUPLE SHARED THEIR PASSION AND FEARS IN THEIR CORRESPONDENCE
Iwoke up absolutely raging with desire for you my love,” Laurence Olivier wrote to Vivien Leigh in a letter from the late 1930s. “Oh dear God how I did want you.” The actors had met in 1936 and soon began a passionate affair that captured the public’s imagination, making them a celebrity couple for the ages. “They were the most famous British lovers of the mid–20th century,” Darwin Porter, author of Damn You, Scarlett O’Hara, tells Closer. “Nearly everyone who wrote about them talked about their beauty — a beautiful couple coming together.”
Much of what we know about the steamy love story between the cateyed Gone With the Wind actress and her handsome husband can be found in the 200-plus letters from Vivien’s estate, now owned by London’s V&A Museum. “The extent of the correspondence…was illuminating,” V&A’s Keith Lodwick notes to Closer. Many missives are about their careers, but some letters also shed light on their “raging” passion, worries over Vivien’s fragile health and, ultimately, their anguish at the end of their relationship after 20 years of marriage. Says Lodwick, “Olivier would begin a letter in the afternoon and would still be drafting it 24 hours later!”
From the start, their love was undeniable. “My longing for you is so intense,” Laurence wrote. “I’m loving and adoring and want you so.” While there are fewer of Vivien’s letters to him in the collection, in one from the early 1950s, she writes, “Whenever you think of me my Larry-boy you will know I am with you adoringly.”
The letters also show what workaholics they were. “He discusses his work opportunities and career problems,” Lodwick explains. And there are a number from Laurence while Vivien was away shooting Gone With the Wind. They both thought the film would flop and he made suggestions about how to recover her career: “You have got to justify yourself in the next two or 3 films…by proving that the presumable failure of Gone W.T.W. was not your fault,” he insisted.
While Vivien found some stability in work, her drastic mood swings magnified her growing battle with bipolar disorder. When she came down with tuberculosis in 1945, Larry’s fear is clear: “Please my angel send me word of what the doctor said. You’re the only person in the world who could make hideously selfish me love another more than I do myself.”
Ultimately, however, their passion cooled in the face of Vivien’s instability, and she suffered a breakdown in 1953. “Of course he tried to take care of her,” Kendra Bean, author of Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait, tells Closer. “It pained him to see her suffering.” Still, they both had affairs, and Laurence asked for a divorce in 1958. He voiced his frustration about Vivien’s behavior in one letter after their split: “I think I could have helped you. But you did not tell me what was happening,” he wrote. In another he laments, “Oh God Vivling, how I do pray that you will find happiness now.”
Vivien, heartbroken but strong, wrote to Laurence in 1960: “Whatever happens let us be friends my dearest one…. I shall love you all my life.” — Lisa Chambers, with reporting by
Amanda Champagne-Meadows
TRIUMPH & TRAGEDY “I am only existing until I see you again…”
— Laurence