Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India to Ernest Hartley, a British Officer in the Indian Cavalry, and Gertrude Robinson Yackje.
Hollywood was in the midst of a widely publicised search to find an actress to portray Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939). Myron Selznick took Leigh and Olivier to the set where the burning of the Atlanta Depot scene was being filmed and introduced Leigh, telling his brother, "Hey, genius. Meet your Scarlett O'Hara." The director, George Cukor, praised Leigh's "incredible wildness"; she secured her role as Scarlett soon after.
Leigh was filming Ceasar and Cleopatra (1945) when she discovered she was pregnant, but she suffered a miscarriage. She fell into a deep depression that hit the low point when she turned on Laurence Olivier, verbally and physically attacking him until she fell to the floor, sobbing. This was the first of many major breakdowns she suffered related to bipolar disorder.
After 326 performances, Leigh finished her run in the theater version of a Streetcar Named Desire. However, she was soon engaged for the film version. Leigh found the role gruelling and commented to the LA Times, "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me."
In January 1953, Leigh travelled to Ceylon to film Elephant Walk. Shortly after filming commenced, she suffered a breakdown; and Paramount Pictures replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. David Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad"; and in his diary Noel Coward expressed surprise that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts."
In 1960, she and Olivier divorced; and Olivier married actress Joan Plowright. In his autobiography, he discussed the years of problems they had experienced because of Leigh's illness: "Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness – an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble."
You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me. -Vivien Leigh
that's heartbreaking. I watched a documentary on her a few years ago, and I got the impression that Olivier was limited in his understanding of her mind.
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