50 Fun Facts About Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh won her two Best Actress Oscars for Scarlett O'Hara and which other character?

Blanche DuBois. Both Oscar roles were belles of the American South played by an Englishwoman, and she had already acted this one for months on the London stage before filming it.

In which city of British India was Vivien Leigh born in 1913?

Darjeeling. At six she was sent from the Himalayan hill station to a convent boarding school in England, the first of several convents across Europe that educated her.

What was Vivien Leigh's surname at birth?

Hartley. Born Vivian Mary Hartley, she borrowed 'Leigh' from her first husband's middle name, and for the stage the spelling of her first name was changed from Vivian to Vivien.

Which future actress was Vivien Leigh's convent schoolfriend, to whom she confided her wish to be 'a great actress'?

Maureen O'Sullivan. She reached the screen first, and it was after watching one of her old schoolfriend's films in a London cinema that Leigh told her parents she meant to act.

Leigh's first husband, whom she married in 1932 aged 19, worked in which profession?

Barrister. She left drama school to marry Leigh Holman, found life as a lawyer's hostess dull, and within months had talked him into letting her go back to her training.

Which 1935 play brought Leigh her first rave reviews and a contract from Alexander Korda?

The Mask of Virtue. Her triumph had a sting: when the play moved to a bigger theatre her voice proved too small to fill it, and the run soon ended.

Which young actor played the brutish Stanley Kowalski opposite Leigh in the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire?

Marlon Brando. He and most of the cast were steeped in the American Method, and Leigh, trained in the English classical tradition, had to blend her way of working with theirs.

Leigh and Olivier began their affair while playing lovers in which 1937 film?

Fire Over England. He played a daring sailor and she a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, and because both were married to other people the romance had to be hidden until they could wed in 1940.

Leigh played Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet in a 1937 Old Vic production staged where?

Elsinore, Denmark. The company played Hamlet at Kronborg, the castle where Shakespeare set it, and the inexperienced Leigh had set her heart on playing opposite Olivier there.

Which role in Wuthering Heights did Leigh turn down because she wanted to play Cathy instead?

Isabella. Director William Wyler told her she would never get a better part for a first American film; within months she had been cast as Scarlett O'Hara.

Who, per legend, introduced Vivien Leigh to Gone with the Wind's producer with 'Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara'?

Myron Selznick. He was the producer's brother and Leigh's Hollywood agent, and he staged the meeting on the night the film's great fire scene was shot, with the flames lighting her face.

Which 1964 Bette Davis chiller did Leigh turn down, a part that went to Olivia de Havilland?

Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Joan Crawford had fallen ill during the shoot; Leigh declined another Southern mansion, and her old co-star from Gone with the Wind stepped in.

Which director, fired early in the Gone with the Wind shoot, did Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland secretly consult?

George Cukor. Both actresses slipped away to him at night and at weekends for coaching, while on set Leigh quarrelled again and again with the man who had replaced him.

Which of Leigh's Gone with the Wind co-stars became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award?

Hattie McDaniel. She won Best Supporting Actress as Mammy, beating her co-star Olivia de Havilland, yet at the ceremony she was seated at a segregated table apart from the rest of the cast.

In which city did Gone with the Wind, the film that made Leigh a star, have its world premiere in 1939?

Atlanta. The city where the story is set laid on three days of parades and a costume ball for the stars, less than a year after Leigh, then little known in America, had won the part.

Where did Leigh and Olivier marry on 31 August 1940, with only their hosts and two witnesses?

San Ysidro Ranch, Santa Barbara. The actor Ronald Colman, who owned the ranch, arranged the ceremony in secret as soon as the couple's divorces came through.

Which actress won the lead in Rebecca (1940) after the producer judged Vivien Leigh's screen test lacking in sincerity?

Joan Fontaine. Olivier, cast as the husband, had lobbied for Leigh, but the producer noticed she had shown no interest in the part until her lover was signed.

Which MGM star was cast opposite Leigh in Waterloo Bridge (1940), though she had wanted Olivier for the part?

Robert Taylor. He was then one of the studio's biggest draws, yet Leigh, who grumbled that the part had been written for Olivier, took top billing in what proved a hit.

Which Shakespeare tragedy did Leigh and Olivier stage on Broadway in 1940, losing most of their savings?

Romeo and Juliet. New York's critics were hostile, one writing that the handsome pair 'hardly act their parts at all', and Olivier had to go back to film work to cover the losses.

In That Hamilton Woman (1941), Leigh played Emma Hamilton opposite Olivier as which naval hero?

Horatio Nelson. The newlywed Oliviers shot the film quickly and cheaply in 1940, with an eye to stirring American sympathy for a Britain already at war.

Which wartime leader loved That Hamilton Woman so much that he called it his favourite film and screened it repeatedly?

Winston Churchill. He is said to have suggested the story himself, and he showed the film to his staff aboard the battleship taking him to meet Roosevelt in 1941.

In the mid-1940s Leigh was diagnosed with which disease, which eventually killed her in 1967?

Tuberculosis. Doctors found a patch on one lung after a cough she could not shake, and though weeks in hospital seemed to cure it, it flared up at intervals for the rest of her life.

Leigh suffered a miscarriage after a fall while filming which Shaw adaptation in 1944?

Caesar and Cleopatra. Some biographers date her long struggle with manic depression from that loss, though others find signs of the illness years earlier.

In 1957 Leigh was asked to leave which chamber after rising to protest at the demolition of a London theatre?

The House of Lords. Seated among the visitors as Lady Olivier, she called out 'My Lords, I wish to protest' against pulling down the St James's Theatre, which was demolished all the same.

The Oliviers' marriage came under strain on a gruelling 1948 Old Vic tour of which part of the world?

Australasia. Six months in Australia and New Zealand left both of them ill, Olivier telling a reporter they were walking corpses, and he later said he 'lost Vivien' in Australia.

Olivier directed Leigh in the 1949 London premiere of a play by which American dramatist?

Tennessee Williams. The play was A Streetcar Named Desire; he approved Leigh for the lead himself, and its frankness about sex scandalised parts of the London press and Parliament.

Which actor played the street performer who takes in Leigh's young pickpocket in St. Martin's Lane (1938)?

Charles Laughton. His own company produced the film, in which the busker turns the light-fingered runaway into a performer and is left behind when she becomes a star.

Which director of the 1951 Streetcar film preferred Jessica Tandy but came to admire Vivien Leigh's grit?

Elia Kazan. He began by thinking she had only 'a small talent', and ended in awe of an actress who, he said, would have crawled over broken glass to better her performance.

Besides the Oscar and BAFTA, Leigh's Streetcar performance won her the Volpi Cup at which film festival?

Venice. The festival honoured her months before the Oscars did, for a part she found so gruelling that she later said it had 'tipped me over into madness'.

In 1943 Leigh left the London stage to entertain Allied troops in which theatre of war?

North Africa. She joined a touring revue, reciting poems and playing scenes from Shakespeare for the troops, and came home with a cough that would not clear.

Which actress replaced Leigh on Elephant Walk after her 1953 breakdown in Ceylon?

Elizabeth Taylor. Reshooting the location scenes would have cost too much, so Leigh's figure was left in some of the finished film's long shots of Ceylon.

Which actor, her Elephant Walk co-star, had an on-off affair with Leigh from 1948?

Peter Finch. The Oliviers had spotted him on stage and brought him to London, where Olivier put him under contract and treated him as a protégé.

Which critic asked 'How great is Vivien Leigh?' in a 1951 newspaper profile that belittled her acting?

Kenneth Tynan. He was 24, and he argued that Olivier dimmed his own talent to suit hers; Leigh, ignoring her good notices, brooded on the charge.

Leigh's last stage role, on Broadway in 1966, was in Ivanov, an early play by which Russian writer?

Anton Chekhov. She played Anna Petrovna, the hero's neglected and dying wife; it proved her farewell, for she died the following year while rehearsing her next play.

Who directed Vivien Leigh and Olivier in Twelfth Night at Stratford in 1955?

John Gielgud. He hoped, he wrote in a letter, to pull 'her little ladyship' out of her 'timidity and safeness', judging her brainier than Olivier but not a born actress.

After the Oliviers divorced in 1960, whom did Olivier marry?

Joan Plowright. Leigh broke the news herself, telling the press that he had asked for a divorce in order to marry Miss Plowright and that she would 'naturally do whatever he wishes'.

Which actor was Leigh's devoted companion from 1960 until her death in 1967?

John Merivale. He shared her London home and her tours abroad, and it was he who found her on the night she died.

Leigh won a Tony Award in 1963 for Best Actress in a Musical for which Broadway show?

Tovarich. It was her only musical: she sang and spoke in a Russian accent as an exiled grand duchess, won the Tony, and then had to leave the show when illness struck.

Leigh's final film, in 1965, was which Stanley Kramer ensemble drama?

Ship of Fools. She played a fading divorcee who breaks into a solitary Charleston and, in another scene, beats off a drunken Lee Marvin with her shoe.

Which Albee play was Leigh rehearsing with Michael Redgrave when her final illness struck in 1967?

A Delicate Balance. Rehearsals for the London production stopped when she fell ill, and she died at home weeks later, before it could open.

In which London square, the site of her blue plaque, did Leigh spend her final years?

Eaton Square. She died in her flat there in July 1967, found on the bedroom floor by her companion soon after he got back from that night's performance.

How did central London's theatres mark the announcement of Leigh's death?

They extinguished their lights for an hour. Olivier, who was in hospital nearby, went straight to her flat and, by his own account, stood and prayed for forgiveness for all that had come between them.

Where were Leigh's ashes scattered, in line with her will?

On the lake at her Sussex home. Tickerage Mill, an old mill house she found after her divorce, was where she gardened through her last summers.

Which body's 1999 list ranked Leigh 16th among the actresses of classic Hollywood?

The AFI, the American Film Institute. It was a high place for someone who treated films as a sideline: she made only about twenty and gave most of her career to the stage.

Which actress played Vivien Leigh in the 2011 film My Week with Marilyn?

Julia Ormond. The film is set during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, in which Marilyn Monroe took the part Leigh had created on stage opposite Olivier.

Leigh's 1985 British Film Year stamp set also featured Chaplin, Sellers, Niven and which director?

Alfred Hitchcock. Of the five film figures honoured, he was the one who had once passed her over, agreeing that her screen test for Rebecca was wrong for the part.

What kind of part did Leigh play in Things Are Looking Up, her first film?

A schoolgirl. She had a single line in the boarding-school comedy, and within five years the bit-part player had become Scarlett O'Hara.

Which 1938 film, the first that MGM made in Britain, gave Leigh a supporting part as a flirtatious married woman?

A Yank at Oxford. The head of MGM took a close interest in the casting himself, and within a year Leigh was in Hollywood playing Scarlett O'Hara.

Which playwright wrote South Sea Bubble, the 1956 comedy Leigh left when she became pregnant?

Noël Coward. The comedy ran on for months without her, and three years later she was back in his work as the star of Look After Lulu!

Which actress was Laurence Olivier's wife when he and Leigh fell in love in the 1930s?

Jill Esmond. Their son was born in the year the affair began; she at first refused Olivier a divorce, and she went on to outlive both her rival and her former husband.