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1 Vivien Leigh, actress and icon: introduction Kate Dorney and Maggie B. Gale This volume of essays has been generated as a response to the Victoria and Albert Museum’ s 2013 acquisition of twentieth-century actress Vivien Leigh ’ s personal archive made up of, amongst other things: letters, scripts, photographs, personal documents, bills, speeches, appointment diaries, lists of luggage contents for tours and even lists of domestic items for repair. Among the tasks this introductory chapter undertakes is to outline the ways in which the archive has been con- structed – which elements were put together by Leigh ’ s mother and daughter, how the archive was and has since been arranged – and what the constructed nature of this evidence might tell us about the curation of Leigh ’ s life and legacy. 1 Many of the essays in this volume have made use of materials from the archive, as well as drawing on other related collections such as the Laurence Olivier archive at the British Library and the Jack Merivale papers at the British Film Institute. These mate- rials have been used in combination with contemporary approaches to theatre historiography, feminist biography and screen and celebrity studies with the specifi c aim of providing new readings of Leigh as an actress and public fi gure. Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon explores the frameworks within which Leigh ’ s work has been analysed to date. We are interested in how she, and others, shaped and projected her public persona, and construc- tions of her personal and domestic life, as well as looking at the ways in which she approached the craft of acting for stage and screen. One of the few mid twentieth-century actresses who successfully and seri- ally moved between stage and screen, picking up two Oscars and a Tony award on her way, Leigh ’ s work deserves closer attention than it has hitherto received. Contributors draw on, and will hopefully add to, the growing body of work in feminist theatre historiography recovering 4 RE-READING VIVIEN LEIGH and reconsidering the role of women in performance histories more generally. In doing so we are following Tracy C. Davis ’ s suggestion that to create a feminist theatre historiography we must connect ‘the woman to the work and the work with the world at large’ ( Davis, 1989 : 66–69). Davis ’s chapter appeared a year after the last major biography of Leigh was published, a biography, like so many other treatments of Leigh, in which the focus on the work was somewhat lost among the discussions of her personal life. Celebrity always assumes its subjects are atypical in the world rather than formed by it, and extant accounts of Leigh are no exception. Our aim in this volume is to both interrogate and thicken those accounts. Vivien Leigh: a brief biography Born in India in 1913, the daughter of affl uent British middle-class and somewhat distant parents, Vivien Leigh was deposited at a Catholic boarding school in Roehampton at the age of 7. She was visited on average once every year by her mother Gertrude, invariably accompa- nied by Tommy, their ‘family friend’ (John Lambert Thomson), rather than Leigh ’ s father Ernest, who remained a distant fi gure in her life ( Vickers, 1990 [1988] : 13). 2 After training briefl y at RADA, married and a mother at 20, with less than half a dozen years of stage and fi lm work under her belt, Leigh shot to fame as Scarlett O’Hara in David O. Selznick ’s 1939 Gone With The Wind, winning an Oscar and a gen- eration of avid fans globally, but especially in the US and at home in the UK. 3 As her career progressed, and despite her ‘star’ status as a fi lm actress, she was more frequently noted for the supposed inadequacies of her talent as a stage performer in comparison to her second husband Laurence Olivier. While fans sometimes questioned her choice of roles – and wrote to her concerned that she was doing herself a disservice by taking on professional engagements with socially ‘deviant’ or uncom- fortably sexual roles such as Blanche DuBois – they rarely critiqued her playing of such roles with the vitriol of some professional critics. 4 For the new enfant terrible of British theatre criticism in the 1950s, Kenneth Tynan – whose middle name of ‘Peacock’ rather suited his style of theatre criticism and the manner in which he inserted himself into the theatre clique he so disapproved of – Olivier was the theatri- cal genius, and Leigh the demanding, and largely incapable, beauty, riding on the wave of her husband ’ s success and benefi tting from his superior knowledge of stage technique. In reality, Leigh was the ‘star’ commodity in the deeply patriarchal, fi nancially driven world of fi lm, while Olivier struggled to win the same level of acclaim and global VIVIEN LEIGH, ACTRESS AND ICON: INTRODUCTION 5 fan base from his fi lm work until much later in his career. Leigh was also ‘out of time’ as an actress, moving into fi lm not long after ‘talkies’ replaced silent movies and after a relatively short stage career. She battled with Selznick ’ s studio over parts, refusing to leave England during the Second World War (1939–1945), and became embroiled in legal battles over her employment choices. Selznick wanted his own way and so did she: their mutually benefi cial position, however, was usually to maintain a harmonious public profi le. 5 Of her generation of actresses, she was unusual in her insistence on continuing and build- ing her stage career after Hollywood success: she continued to move between stage and screen throughout her career, from her early 20s to her early 50s. While other actors such as Bette Davis and David Niven famously fell out with their studios over roles and being contracted out to other studios, Leigh usually won her battles over casting. Although she was sometimes disappointed not to be cast opposite Olivier on screen – for example in Rebecca , Wuthering Heights and H enry V – she rarely took on screen roles she thought unsuitable. 6 This meant, however, that for most of the 1940s she was embroiled in battles with the studios; as Charles Drazin points out, it was largely a contract that ‘governed Vivien Leigh ’ s career’ ( Drazin, 2011 [2002 ]: 262). Professional marriage: a business affair Her private and professional relationship with Olivier saw them dubbed as ‘theatre royalty’ and they certainly seem to have been as frequently photographed, interviewed and written about as the Queen and Prince Philip. The Oliviers had something to sell: fi lms, stage performances, good causes, goods (through their advertising contracts), so living their lives in public was part of the deal. They were p rofessional partners as well as domestic ones: a perspective on their relationship that is often lost in the retelling of the love affair that burned out. That narrative depicts them gradually falling out of love because of Leigh ’ s health issues, which needed active consideration and prevented Olivier from focusing on his own career, and so he drifted away. They had become lovers in the mid to late 1930s, while still married to Jill Esmond and Leigh Holman respectively. Their colleagues all knew they were having an affair – Leigh had surprisingly followed Olivier and Esmond on a holiday to Capri as early as 1936. 7 During her year working on G one With The Wind t hey sent each other cryptic, romantic telegrams using pseudonyms and writing short but ardent messages. 8 Their divorces and subsequent marriage were carefully staged, with studio interven- tion: divorce was still socially outlawed and only available to a minority, and adultery was frowned upon. Not long after their marriage and 6 RE-READING VIVIEN LEIGH return to England, they were separated by war, hampered by Leigh ’ s illness and beholden to the implications of both of their demanding ambitions for stage work. Numerous biographers frame their relationship almost entirely in terms of Leigh being beholden to Olivier ’ s professional superiority as an actor (see Jesse Lasky Jr and Pat Silver, 1978 ). Some of the more ‘racy’ biographers suggest that Olivier ’ s bisexuality drove them apart or that Leigh herself was promiscuous (see Porter and Moseley, 2011 ). Their fi lm partnership ended early in the 1940s: she was under con- tract to Selznick but wanted to be near Olivier – now conscripted – in Europe, and Korda, to whom Leigh was ‘lent’ by Selznick ’ s studio, didn ’ t cast them together after T hat Hamilton Woman (1941). Somehow they had less marketability as a fi lm partnership than Leigh would have liked. It is clear that as the ‘golden couple’ of theatre their personal relationship was fading at the point at which their professional drawing power was at its height in theatre. Olivier claims Leigh told him she no longer loved him as early as 1948 ( Olivier, 1982 : 131), but they did not divorce until 1960: he had numerous affairs, and opinion is varied as to how much Leigh indulged in extra marital activity. Either way, their professional cachet as a couple far outlived, it would seem, a consistently intimate marital connection. Extant biographies: re-inscribing Vivien Leigh So much has been written about Vivien already and so much of it dwells on the so-called ‘dark’ side of her life that I felt it was time there was some light. I never experienced the ‘dark’ side of her – except for a glimpse on one or two occasions – and I see no reason why we should continue to concentrate on what, in her case, was a condition caused by actual physical illness. ( McBean, 1989 : 10) Leigh ’ s friend and collaborator Angus McBean ’ s response to accounts of the ‘dark’ side of Leigh was to produce Vivien Leigh: A Love Affair in Camera , a fond account of one of his favourite subjects beautifully illustrated by his own photographs. The book was not his fi rst foray into defending Leigh ’ s reputation. A decade earlier he wrote to the Observer to express his shock at an article in their magazine publicising Anne Edwards ‘unnecessary, unpleasant and, except at the most super- fi cial level, deeply untruthful book’.9 He was responding to the maga- zine ’ s feature on Edward ’ s 1977 biography described as revealing quite another Vivien Leigh: a wild screaming vixen who suddenly lashed out at people with obscenities, kicks and punches: even at Larry, the man she loved most in the world. The ultra-fastidious convent-trained paragon VIVIEN LEIGH, ACTRESS AND ICON: INTRODUCTION 7 of deportment turned into a promiscuous slut, hungry for one-night stands with working class pick-ups. The masterful controlled beauty – rebuked by critics for her ‘artshop daintiness’ – would suddenly begin to strip off in public, or try to throw herself out of trains and aircrafts. The Gainsborough Lady was afraid of going mad.1 0 As this offensively sensationalist summary suggests, the book was very different to the respectful volumes that had preceded it and marked the beginning of establishing a new narrative of Leigh. Gwen Robyns ’ s Light of a Star ( Robyns, 1968 ) and Alan Dent ’ s V ivien Leigh: A Bouquet ( Dent, 1969 ) had painted a picture of an ethereal beauty who worked too hard and consequently suffered from nerves, but was also an intel- ligent woman with a lightning sense of humour. Dent – journalist, scriptwriter and old friend – drew on answers to a ‘set of six questions to a hundred or so of the actress’ best friends and colleagues’ to outline her public and private faces and then used his experience as a theatre and fi lm critic to consider her as a stage and screen actress. The book is the source of many anecdotes about Leigh that appear in subsequent accounts, notably the contributions from Oswald Frewen, a close friend of Leigh and her fi rst husband. Dent ’ s biography is, as its title suggests, a mixed affair combining unpublished testimony with fi llers from critics. He readily admits in the introduction that although he loved her as a friend he was less enthusiastic about her professional accom- plishments, and his questions refl ect this ambivalence: 1. When did you fi rst see or meet Vivien, and what was your immediate fi rst impression? 2. What were the qualities you most admired in her personality? 3. Did you have any serious quarrels or misunderstandings? 4. How highly did you rate her as an actress (a) for the stage and (b) for the screen? 5. Where would you place her among the most beautiful women of her time? 6. Have you any anecdote or story about her? Or anything else to say of her? ( Dent, 1969 : 12) There are positive responses from Alfred Lunt (who with his wife Lynn Fontanne were the American equivalent of the Oliviers), Michael Red- grave and Rachel Kempson, Athene Seyler, Terence Rattigan, Nöel Coward, Isabel Jeans and George Cukor among others. All comment on her star quality and continual efforts to improve her acting. Dent, a journalist like Robyns, also included much cooler accounts from Anthony Quayle and Kenneth More who disapproved of her ambition and self-assurance. 8 RE-READING VIVIEN LEIGH Edwards ’ s book is the start of a series in which each biographer devotes as much space to Olivier as they do to Leigh. The Observer Magazine notes that, to write this workmanlike, sympathetic but superfi cial biography she has listened to many people very close to Vivien Leigh. Ms Edwards did not get to see Sir Laurence; and she never met Vivien. It shows. Still, her book is indispensable to an understanding of the Olivier myth.1 1 Ten years after her death, Leigh was already subsumed into the Olivier myth. This was compounded by Garry O’Connor ’ s Darling of the Gods: One Year in the Lives of Laurence and Olivier ( 1984 ), in which Leigh and Olivier assumed their now familiar and un-nuanced roles. In 1987, to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Leigh ’ s death, E vening Stan- dard fi lm critic Alexander Walker released V ivien: A Life of Vivien Leigh . His book paints a picture of a couple for whom the strain of juggling joint and separate careers is added to by the need to make money and maintain a golden image. What emerges is a suggestion that Leigh was a liability after her public breakdown in 1953, that she had to be ‘carried’ by Olivier, and this becomes embedded in the myth of their imbal- anced relationship. Cecil Beaton ’ s biographer Hugo Vickers had full access to family papers and, as reviewers noted, more sympathy for Leigh. Rachel Bil- lington reviewing his book in 1988 suggests he, makes less of a tragedy of Vivien Leigh ’ s life – the drinking, the hopeless lack of discipline – than other biographers. He is at pains to establish her education and culture and her practical kindness. He builds up this image through concentrating on her background and her long-lasting friendships. However, he does seem to have achieved this at the expense of a true understanding of her manic urge towards self-destruction […] Vickers is not keen to show his beautiful and brilliant heroine as a neurotic victim. Yet, fi nally that is exactly how she appears: victim to a beauty that was always just a bit more evident than her talent.1 2 It is diffi cult to ignore the underlying agenda that Billington brings to her assessment of this work. Obviously, for her, Vickers ’ s biography is not enough to undo the popular myth – Vivien Leigh as a tragic but beautiful victim – in which she, it would appear, is a strong believer. Kendra Bean ’ s celebration of Leigh marking the centenary of her birth is the fi rst to make use of the Laurence Olivier archive at the British Library, noting: This previously untapped treasure trove of archival material, which includes everything from personal correspondence between Vivien and Olivier to fi lm contracts, director ’ s notes, interview transcripts, and legal and medical records, sheds new light on these two topics [her mental illness and per- sonal and professional relationship with Olivier]. ( Bean, 2013 : 14) VIVIEN LEIGH, ACTRESS AND ICON: INTRODUCTION 9 Written by a devoted fan without an agenda of negativity, Bean uses the Olivier archive with the express purpose of accruing more evidence of Leigh ’ s professional practice: to open out more dimensions for our readings of her life and work. Perspectives on Leigh There are a number of books on Vivien Leigh which collate anecdotes and recollections of her as a colleague and friend or trace her career as a fi lm star and her working and domestic relationship with Laurence Olivier; but there are none which assess the different aspects of Leigh ’ s life and career from a critical perspective. While many biographers approach Leigh with the clear intention of talking about her career, they inevitably end up focusing on her work and personal life as if the two are inevitably the same thing rather than two co-dependent ‘lives’ entwined. Thus John Russell Taylor, for whom there ‘never was, and never has been since, anyone remotely like her on the British stage or the English speaking screen’, suggests that the revelations about her mental health should make ‘little or no difference to our evaluation of her professional career’ ( Russell Taylor, 1984 : 10). He then, however, moves on to describe her illness as ‘disruptive forces in her psyche’, which presented some ‘cost to her abilities as an actress’ (ibid: 81). To some extent he too is caught up in the predicament shared by other critics of Leigh ’ s career: they have to fi nd a balance between being drawn to anecdotes about her ascribed, or predetermined, celebrity, as compared with analysing the evidence of her achieved celebrity. Leigh had a great deal of ascribed celebrity: a form of celebrity status which is less to do with achievement and more to do with existing assets or assigned roles. So her ascribed celebrity was constructed around her dazzling beauty, the publicity generated from her being cast in high- profi le screen roles – just being c ast as Scarlett O’Hara ascribes one celebrity status – and, of course, by her marriage to Olivier. Her a chieved celebrity is never as clear cut. She can ’ t just be a fabulous stage and screen actress, a box-offi ce draw and have an extraordinary ability to play a range of challenging roles over a career spanning more than thirty years. Instead she has to be ‘mad’ in performance because she is ‘mad’ in life, a tragic beauty plagued by a fatal fl aw – either ambition or her illness. Thus her achieved celebrity is not just shaped by her professional accomplishments, but also by her social notoriety. McBean and Russell Taylor avoid this trope as far as possible, but it is often lurking in the background (see McBean, 1989 ). In part this is a problem with historiographical approaches to the analysis of performing women ’ s professional lives more generally: the domestic often ends up being foregrounded over the professional and questions of the 10 RE-READING VIVIEN LEIGH nuanced quality of labour. With Leigh this foregrounding has hard- ened into an established narrative of her life and one can sense that the few who have written about her work in an evaluative or critical mode – Vickers and Bean might be counted among these – have had to persistently attempt to escape this narrative, structured like a three- act play: Act I: early life and rise to fame; Act II: being famous and married to Olivier – one half of the golden couple of theatre; Act III: tragic decline and early death. This constant over-privileging of life over art is a typical part of what Michael Quinn identifi es as the quality of ‘celebrity’: Celebrity in its usual variety […] is not composed of acting technique but of personal information. The fi rst requisite for celebrity is public notoriety, which is only sometimes achieved through acting. In the context of this public identity there then comes to exist a link between performer and audience, quite apart from the dramatic character (or in only an oblique relation to stage fi gure and character). ( Quinn, 1990 : 156) As the archives show, Leigh ’ s connection to her audience was strengthened by their identifi cation with the roles she played and, later, with the struggles she appeared to be having with her health and her marriage. Among the many touching letters written to Leigh and Olivier after news of her breakdown during the fi lming of E lephant Walk in 1953, Sara Dallwin, a ‘young drama student’ from Rotherham, writes to offer her comfort: Oh Miss Leigh, if you knew how much you are loved – not merely admired or envied, but loved. Here, in this industrial Northern town, where the words ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ mean nothing to most people, during your illness your name was on almost every tongue, the tongues of men and women who have seen you only on celluloid. This makes everything ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ all worth- while. For to be loved by thousands, millions of people, not only as an actress, but as a woman, is a blessed thing.1 3 As Kendra Bean ’ s chapter in this volume investigates, Leigh knew what it was to be a fan and responded generously to her own. But the blurring of actress and woman voiced in Dallwin ’s letter was achieved at some cost. Access to Leigh ’ s veridical or ‘true’ self, her ‘I’ as Chris Rojek, following George Herbert Mead, names it, was either limited or carefully stage managed in terms of press coverage during her lifetime ( Rojek, 2001 : 10). Her ‘public’ often assumed or treated her ‘me’ – the constructed self presented to the world – and her ‘I’ – her ‘veridical’, true or private self – to be one and the same. Leigh, like many celebri- ties, is someone for whom both her constructed self and her veridical self have been ‘the site of perpetual public excavation’ (ibid: 19). VIVIEN LEIGH, ACTRESS AND ICON: INTRODUCTION 11 Unlike many actresses and performers whose careers began in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, Leigh left no autobiogra- phy and never engaged a biographer. It is ironic that while she may not have had any interest in writing such a volume, her letters, speeches and notes indicate that she would have had a commanding, intelligent and acerbically witty authorial voice as the writer of an autobiography. The construction of her auto/biographic narrative thus far has been created without interventions from Leigh herself: although of course one might argue that in keeping so many of her private and profes- sional papers she was effectively ‘self-archiving’. Even though we cannot be certain of her role and intention in the gathering and keeping of such materials, the breadth and depth of extant materials, beyond the usual scrapbooks of reviews and interviews, is extraordinary. Her business-like attitude to life is evidenced through her orderly approach to maintaining correspondence and household administration: letters from and to fans, to her employees, friends and professional acquain- tances, lists of the contents of luggage, invitations to exhibitions, lists of instructions for household items to be repaired while she is on tour, of clothes and shoes to be sold and so on. Her life story has also been heavily framed by the auto/biographies of Olivier, and others who worked with her, or encountered her profes- sionally (see Maggie B. Gale ’ s Chapter 4 ). Auto/biographical reference to iconic professional collaborations often legitimate the career of the writer or the subject of the biography; while they might provide useful insights they are not ‘truths’. Outside of her own archive, and apart from numerous and often unsubstantiated screen and theatre anec- dotes, Leigh ’ s own voice is largely absent. In Chapter 2 in this volume, Kate Dorney provides an analysis of Leigh ’ s voice as expressed in letters and interviews and the strategies she employed to stage manage her encounters with the press and, through them, the public. She often charmed interviewers, going out of her way to put them at ease because she had a clear understanding of the importance and the nature of the professional exchange that such encounters signify. While at pains to create a pleasant atmosphere in interviews, there is sometimes a quality of defensiveness in her voice caused, in part, by her sense of needing to steer the questioning or defend herself as an artist. Not dissimilar to other actresses of her era – and some would argue that this approach persists even today – interviews are often framed by questions about how she manages motherhood and work, or about how she manages the pace of her work while maintaining her social life, about how she manages the balance between her beauty and the requirements of a part, and whether she ‘is’ in fact the parts she plays. 12 RE-READING VIVIEN LEIGH Leigh sought out many of the roles she played, not just Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire . Not only did she design and defi ne her career as much as was possible for a woman of her generation, but she was also meticulous in the method and level of preparation she undertook for both stage and fi lm roles. This nar- rative does not sit comfortably with the popular image of Leigh as an unstable and fragile beauty, the jilted wife of one of the most renowned actors of the twentieth century. A voracious reader, Leigh had her own views of the construction and function of biography expressed here in her review of a biography of Emma Hamilton whom she played on screen: It is no pleasure to me to add that – but I do feel it strongly […] the scope of this book seems to me to be out of all proportion to Emma ’ s importance. She lived for another 15 years after this book had done with her […] this biography, you see, tells only the fi rst half of Emma ’ s story, and my chief contention here is that the book should have told the whole story in h alf the number of words. ( Dent, 1969 : 124–5) We might make a similar observation here and suggest that in focus- ing chiefl y on Leigh ’ s personal life, we have only half the story. Or, that half the number of words might be devoted to her life and half to her work. The acquisition of Leigh ’ s archive by the V&A in 2013 was the subject of great press and public interest. Purchased from her daughter, Suzanne Farrington, it includes more than 7,000 letters, Figure 1.1 Vivien Leigh on tour during the Second World War.

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66–69). Davis ' s chapter appeared a year after the last major biography of Leigh was published, .. In other words she was a tragic beauty and a ruthless operator. The press release issued by the . of the framework of a stock company or any extended period working with a particular group of actor
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.