VIVIEN LEIGH Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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VIVIEN LEIGH

Name: Vivian Mary Hartley                                                             
Born: 5 November 1913 Darjeeling, West Bengal, British India                         
Died: 8 July 1967 London, England                                                     
                                                                                     
Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (5 November 1913 - 8 July 1967) was an English             
actress. She won two Academy Awards for playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara   
in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951),   
a role she had also played in London's West End.                                     
                                                                                     
She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband,     
Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her thirty-year   
stage career, she played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noël Coward and     
George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia,     
Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.                                                   
                                                                                     
Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being         
taken seriously as an actress, but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle.     
Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult life, she gained a reputation     
for being a difficult person to work with, and her career went through periods       
of decline. She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis,     
with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in     
1960, and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from         
tuberculosis.