Vivien Leigh
- Category : Actress
- Type : MGE
- Profile : 6/2 - Role Model / Hermit
- Definition : Split - Small (5,10,20,48,59)
- Incarnation Cross : LAX Incarnation 2
Biography
Vivien Leigh (November 5, 1913 – July 8, 1967) was a two-time Academy Award winning English actress. She won two Oscars 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. One example of her range is the fact that she played Cleopatra, in both the comedy-drama and classic drama contexts (Shaw's and Shakespeare's), during the same period of time, alternating between the two plays on stage when the different performances were scheduled..
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 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.
