Vivien Leigh - Biography

While there her mother came for a visit and took her to a play on London's legendary West Side. It was there that Vivien decided to become an actress. At the end of her education, she met and married Herbert Leigh in 1932 and together had a child named Suzanne in 1933. Though she enjoyed motherhood, it did not squelch her ambition to be an actress. 
Her first role in British motion pictures was as Rose Venables in 1935's The Village Squire. 

In 1938, Vivien went to the United States to see her lover Laurence Olivier who was filming Wuthering Heights (she had left her husband in 1937). While visiting Olivier Vivien had the good luck to happen upon the Selznick brothers who were filming the burning of Atlanta for the film, Gone With the Wind. The role of Scarlett O'Hara had yet to be cast and she was invited to take part in a screen test for the role. Four days after the screen test, Vivien was informed that she had landed the coveted slot. 

Vivien won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Scarlett. Already she was a household name. In 1940, she made two films, Waterloo Bridge and 21 DAYS though neither approached the magnetism of GWTW. That same year Vivien married Olivier and together appeared in That Hamilton Woman in 1941. By the time of the filming of Caesar and Cleopatra (1944) her life began to unravel. Vivien had suffered two miscarriages, tuberculosis, and was diagnosed as a manic depressive. However her public was still enthralled with her. She rebounded nicely for her role as Blanche DuBois for her second Oscar winning performance in A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Marlon Brando in 1951. Vivien died at the age of 53 after a severe bout of tuberculosis on July 7, 1967