Vivien Leigh shone in shadow of greatness

Letters detail fragile star’s romance with Olivier

Vivien Leigh, born 100 years ago this month, was as pretty a woman as ever appeared on screen. A season of her work, now showing at the British Film Institute, reminds us of the crystalline physical perfection that could irradiate even a load of old hokum such as Waterloo Bridge (1940).

Leigh’s career was launched on what stage actress Dame Edith Evans called the “primitive passport” of her looks. Yet she ventured, at some personal cost, into territory where that passport had no validity.

Leigh was always more interesting, in fact, than the pretty-girl roles she was given in such films as A Yank at Oxford or Fire Over England. Her de- mure porcelain face was full of latent vitality. Her smile had a quality of perverse intrigue, like a Siamese cat pondering how to pounce on a bird.

Her real-life character informed her acting persona, and that character was a tricky one. Leigh was clever, sexy, fragile and difficult. Noel Coward wrote in his diary: “She is such a darling when she is all right and such a conceited little bitch when she isn’t all right.”

Her natural feline complexity found an outlet in Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone With the Wind (1939). Ninety Hollywood stars tested for the role, which was snatched by a relative unknown. “She could,” as the actor Wilfrid Hyde-White once said, “have been prime minister, for nothing ever deterred her from getting her way.”

She had been similarly hell-bent on capturing Laurence Olivier. They married in 1940, a few months after Leigh became the first British actress to win a leading-role Oscar.

Theirs was one of the great 20thcentury romances, as the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recently acquired Vivien Leigh archive makes clear. Part of this intimate collection — letters, diaries, scrapbooks, heavily annotated scripts, photographs — is now on display. Much of the correspondence is with Olivier.

“My dear sweetheart,” Leigh wrote to him, “my love is with you every second.” Insane though they were about each other, they were also insanely competitive.

This may well have been the source of Leigh’s later unhappiness, the volatility, the heavy drinking, the affairs with actors such as Peter Finch: she was always, desperately, striving to assert herself against the greatest talent of a generation.