After you’ve been to bed with Vivien nothing else matters

Her life ended in a haze of drink and depression. But she was also a brilliant actress, the love of Olivier’s life — and as Peter Finch once said...

VIvIen LeIGH will forever be remembered for two things: as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, and as Laurence Olivier’s greatest love — after acting.

It was a passionate whirlwind of a life, if not always a happy one, ending in heavy drinking, bipolar disorder and a tragically early death from TB at 53.

Some of the most beautiful actresses of stage and screen are, to be blunt, rather dull. Others are notorious party girls and man-eaters, like Mae West, but not exactly beautiful.

vivien Leigh, a very english conventschool girl, was both gorgeous and captivating. In the words of that old charmer David niven, she was ‘the most beautiful woman I ever saw outside an art gallery’. Another of her many lovers, Peter Finch, once told a friend: ‘After you’ve been to bed with vivien, nothing else matters.’

She was a child of the British Raj, born on Fireworks night, 1913, in Darjeeling. Her father went on hunting expeditions into the Indian jungle, while her own early reading included the much-loved Just So stories of Rudyard Kipling.

But at the age of just six, she was shipped back to the old country for a proper education. At the convent, the girls had to eat rhubarb with salt instead of sugar, ‘to mortify the sense of taste’.

But her letters home sound like those of an irrepressible schoolgirl, full of humour and fun. After being punished for talking in class, she wrote to her mother: ‘Don’t you call it beastly? I do think it’s simply the BUn! Mother Bruce-Hall said she hoped I had tribulation — she said it would do me a lot of good.’

Her hasty first marriage was to kindly barrister Leigh Holman, 13 years her senior, whom she first glimpsed across the room at a party.

When told he was practically engaged already, she said: ‘That doesn’t matter. He hasn’t seen me yet.’ They were duly married, had a daughter called Suzanne, and then she went off to RADA. Like many arty types, it’s clear that, for all her charm and talent, vivien Leigh was a hopeless mother.

Suzanne was essentially raised by her grandmother, while the aspiring actress spent her nights out in Soho with other actors and actresses, says Strachan, in ‘a world of alcohol-fuelled casual promiscuity’. Her husband’s attitude to all this is never quite explained, and he remained devoted to her all his life. The next few years were tumultuous. She and Olivier began their affair on the set of Fire Over england, a rousing Thirties romp about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. He was already married, too, and expecting his first child by his wife Jill. Actors!

Oliver wrote to her things such as: ‘Oh I love, love, love, love, my lambkin,’ and when they were apart: ‘I really am in Hell, my love . . . the valley of the shadow . . . I keep crying.’

When she sent him a bunch of carnations, he wore one of them in his underpants, which doesn’t sound very comfortable. In old age, Olivier reminisced that they used to make love three times a day, while vivien wrote: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever lived as intensely since . . . I don’t remember sleeping . . . I imagined, like the very young always do, that everything lasts for ever.’

The high point of her career was of course Gone With The Wind. She beat Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn to the role and became a worldwide star, more famous than Olivier himself — who was by now her second husband. But World War II interrupted everything.

Unlike today, British actors were staunch patriots. Olivier, looking for ‘a national expression of the British spirit’, found it in his glorious film of Henry v. vivien meanwhile toured north Africa entertaining the troops, including Montgomery himself in Tripoli.

HeR one other major success was as Blanche DuBois (another doomed Southern belle) in A Streetcar named Desire in 1951. Meanwhile, there appeared an exceptionally nasty new critic, Kenneth Tynan, who wore gold lame shirts, and never lost an opportunity to pour scorn on her performances — idiotically, because any re-visit