Born Vivian Mary Hartley on November 5, 1913, Vivien Leigh was an actress. In 1947, she became known as Lady Olivier, a renowned British actress. In 1935, after finishing theater school, Leigh had little parts in four films before starring as the heroine in Fire Over England (1937). Following her 1949 stage debut in London's West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire, she went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress for her roles as Blanche DuBois in the 1951 film adaptation and Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. The 1963 Broadway musical adaptation of Tovarich also garnered her a Tony Award.
Although she became famous as an actor on film, Leigh's true calling was in the theater. Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet, and Lady Macbeth were just a few of the great Shakespearean roles she portrayed over her 30-year career, in addition to the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies. She had a few film roles as a supporting actress later in life. Despite her sporadic career, Leigh was named the sixteenth greatest female Hollywood star of all time by the American Film Institute in 1999. Leigh was also quite beautiful, but she struggled to get her acting career taken seriously due to her looks.
From 1940 to 1960, Leigh was married to Laurence Olivier, and the public closely associated her with him. Together, Leigh and Olivier appeared in three films and several stage shows, with Olivier directing most of the time. She was known to be a pain to deal with and suffered from bipolar illness and chronic TB, both of which she battled throughout her life. The former was diagnosed in the mid-1940s and continued until her death at the age of 53.
What a life and a career!
// Beginnings and first appearances in the spotlight (1913–1934)
Vivian Mary Hartley, who would later be known as Leigh, was born on November 5, 1913, in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India, on the grounds of St. Paul's School. Her parents were the British broker Ernest Richard Hartley and his wife Gertrude Mary Frances, whose maiden name was Robinson and who was formerly known as Yackjee. She was their only child. Her mother, a devoted Catholic, was born in Darjeeling in 1888 to parents who may have been of Armenian, Parsi Indian, or Irish descent; her father was born in Scotland in 1882. Gertrude's parents were Michael John Yackjee, an independent-minded Anglo-Indian man, and Mary Teresa Robinson, an orphan whose Irish family had perished in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The two met and married in 1872; Gertrude was the youngest of five children born to this union. The Kensington, London, wedding of Ernest and Gertrude Hartley took place in 1912.
As officers in the Indian Cavalry, Ernest Hartley was sent to Bangalore in 1917, while Gertrude and Vivian remained at Ootacamund. Vivian recited "Little Bo Peep" for the first time on stage when she was three years old, performing for her mother's amateur theater company. Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Greek mythology, and Indian folklore were among the authors that Gertrude Hartley sought to expose her daughter to in an effort to foster in her a love of reading and writing. After Vivian's mother sent her away from Loreto Convent in Darjeeling when she was six years old, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, southwest London, which is now Woldingham School. There, Vivian made her ambition to become "a great actress" known to her friend Maureen O'Sullivan, who would go on to star in her own film. Maureen was two years her senior. Upon her father's removal, she spent four years traveling with her parents to several European schools, where she became proficient in French and Italian and where she attended schools in Dinard (Brittany, France), Biarritz (France), the Sacred Heart in San Remo on the Italian Riviera, and Paris. Upon their return to Britain in 1931, the family... She informed her parents she wanted to be an actress after seeing one of Gilbert and Sullivan's pictures, A Connecticut Yankee, on the London West End. Not long after that, Vivian's father sent her to London to attend RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Herbert Leigh Holman, surnamed Leigh Holman, was a lawyer thirteen years her senior when Vivian met him in 1931. They tied the knot on December 20, 1932, despite his disdain of "theatrical people." Soon after, she stopped going to RADA and lost interest in acting, which she had begun to experience after meeting Holman. Suzanne, whose maiden name was Suzanne Farrington, was born to her on October 12, 1933, in London.
Laurence Olivier's early career, 1935–1939
Leigh made her film debut, albeit uncredited, in Things Are Looking Up, playing a small part as a schoolgirl, at the recommendation of her friends. John Gliddon, her agent, thought "Vivian Holman" was too feminine for an actress. She went by "Vivian Leigh" professionally after she turned down all of his recommendations. Gliddon suggested she be considered by Alexander Korda as an actress for his films, but Korda passed. After her 1935 performance in Sydney Carroll's The Mask of Virtue, which garnered rave reviews, she was the subject of interviews and news coverage. The interviewer first publicly mentioned her fast mood changes—"a lightning change came over her face"—in a Daily Express piece, marking the first public mention of this trait. The poet laureate John Betjeman uttered the words "the essence of English girlhood" for her. Despite his mistake, Korda went to her opening night performance, signed her to a film contract, and explained his mistake. Even though she persisted with the play, Korda relocated it to a bigger theater, and shortly after, the production ended because Leigh couldn't sufficiently project her voice or keep the attention of such a huge crowd. Carroll changed her first name to "Vivien" in the playbill.
"Some critics saw fit to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say. It put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply couldn't handle. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said for those first notices. I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well and have never forgiven him." (Leigh, 1960). Reflecting on her initial experience of critical acclaim and sudden fame, Leigh expressed her mixed feelings about it.
At Leigh's behest, John Buckmaster brought her to the Savoy Grill in the fall of 1935, where Laurence Olivier and his first wife Jill Esmond frequently dined following his Romeo and Juliet performance. After seeing Leigh in May's The Mask of Virtue, Olivier was impressed with her performance. Although Olivier was still married to Esmond and Leigh to Holman, they had an affair while playing lovers in Fire Over England (1937). During this time, Leigh read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and told her American agent to suggest her to David O. Selznick, who was developing a screen adaptation of the book. A journalist overheard her say, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara," and C. Leigh "stunned us all" at the time when she said that Olivier "won't play Rhett Butler, but I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see." A. Lejeune recounted a discussion at that time in which Leigh made the revelation.
An Old Vic Theatre production held in Elsinore, Denmark, cast Leigh as Ophelia against Olivier as Hamlet, despite her relative lack of expertise in the role. She was getting ready to walk onstage when her mood suddenly shifted, an experience that Olivier recounted afterward. It was as if he had provoked her; she started yelling at him, then went silent and stared into space. Without incident, she went on with her performance, and the next day, she was back to her usual self, completely forgetting what had happened. This was Olivier's first experience with her acting in such a way. Since their husbands would not divorce any of them, they started living together. Their relationship had to remain hidden from the public eye because to the moral standards established by the film business at the time.
In A Yank at Oxford (1938), Leigh made her American film debut alongside Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, and Maureen O'Sullivan. Partially due to her distaste for her supporting position and primarily because her spoiled behavior appeared to be yielding results, she earned a reputation for being demanding and irrational during production. Following the handling of a frivolous lawsuit, Korda directed her agent to inform her that her option would not be renewed unless her behavior improved. Sidewalks of London, aka St. Martin's Lane (1938), was her subsequent film performance, co-starring Charles Laughton.
Olivier has been making efforts to diversify his filmography. Despite his popularity in Britain, he remained relatively unknown in America, and previous efforts to expose him to American audiences had also been unsuccessful. He left Leigh in London for Hollywood when offered the part of Heathcliff in Samuel Goldwyn's Wuthering Heights (1939). William Wyler and Goldwyn offered Leigh the part of Isabella, a supporting character, but she turned them down because she wanted Merle Oberon to play Cathy.
1939: The film "Gone with the Wind"
The woman who would play Scarlett O'Hara in David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939) was the subject of a well publicized casting call in Hollywood at the time. Myron Selznick, who was both David's brother and Leigh's agent in the United States, was the representative of the Myron Selznick Agency in London when this occurred. For the role of Scarlett O'Hara, Leigh approached Myron in February 1938 and requested that she be considered.
Following her stellar performances in Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford that month, David O. Selznick deemed her "too British" to play Scarlett, despite his admiration for her acting. Yet, Leigh went to Los Angeles to be with Olivier and to persuade David Selznick that she was the one for the role. When Myron Selznick saw Leigh, he thought she had all the traits that Olivier had been looking for, and he was also representing Olivier. The story goes that Myron Selznick brought Leigh and Olivier to the set of the Atlanta Depot burning scene and stage-managed an encounter. During the introduction, Selznick reportedly said to Leigh, "Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara." The next day, Leigh read a scene for Selznick, who then arranged a screen test with director George Cukor and wrote to his wife, "She's the Scarlett dark horse and looks damn good. Not for anyone's ear but your own: it's narrowed down to Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett and Vivien Leigh." With a nod to Leigh's "incredible wildness," director George Cukor agreed. She quickly landed the part of Scarlett.
For Leigh, filming was a real challenge. Victor Fleming succeeded Cukor, and Leigh had several disagreements with him. Cukor met with her and Olivia de Havilland behind closed doors on weekends and nights to give them acting tips. Leigh got along with Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and Olivia de Havilland, but she had a falling out with Leslie Howard, who she had to portray in a number of touching situations. Working late into the night and seven days a week was already causing Leigh a lot of stress, and she missed Olivier, who was in New York City, for his job. While speaking on the phone with Olivier across long distance, she shouted, "Puss, my puss, how I hate film acting! Hate, hate, and never want to do another film again!"
Olivia de Havilland defended Vivien Leigh from accusations of manic behavior while filming Gone with the Wind. According to her, Leigh had two major concerns: performing well in a challenging role and being apart from Larry Olivier, who was in New York.
Despite Leigh's meteoric rise to stardom thanks to Gone with the Wind, she once said, "I'm not a film star—I'm an actress. Being a film star—just a film star—is such a false life, lived for fake values and publicity. Actresses go on for a long time and there are always marvellous parts to play." The picture went on to win ten Oscars, including Best Actress for Leigh, who also took home the top prize from the New York Film Critics Circle.
From 1940 until 1949, there was marriage and the beginning of a partnership with Olivier.
Although they remained close friends throughout Leigh Holman's life, Jill Esmond and Laurence Olivier divorced in February 1940, and Leigh Holman and Vivien ended their marriages. The court decided to give Esmond full custody of Tarquin, the son she had with Olivier. With Leigh's help, Holman was able to secure custody of their daughter, Suzanne. The wedding of Olivier and Leigh took place at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California, on August 31, 1940. The venue was reserved for the exclusive use of the hosts, Ronald and Benita Colman, as well as witnesses, Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin. In the upcoming Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca, starring Olivier, Leigh had prepared a screen test in the hopes of co-starring alongside him. All three of these people—Hitchcock, Leigh's mentor George Cukor, and David Selznick—thought that "she doesn't seem right as to sincerity or age or innocence" after watching Leigh's screen test.
Upon realizing that Joan Fontaine had displayed little interest in the role prior to Olivier's confirmation as the leading actor, Selznick recruited her. Leigh wanted to star opposite Laurence Olivier in Pride and Prejudice (1940), but he wouldn't let her, thus Greer Garson ended up playing the part. Instead of Olivier and Leigh, Selznick cast Robert Taylor, who was then enjoying his greatest success as one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most beloved male actors, in Waterloo Bridge (1940). Both reviewers and moviegoers praised the picture, and her leading role belied her star power in Hollywood.
On Broadway, the Oliviers staged a rendition of Romeo and Juliet. The New York press raised questions about Olivier and Leigh's morality for not going back to the UK to aid the war effort and publicized the adulterous nature of their relationship's commencement. The reviews of Romeo and Juliet were mostly negative. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson said: "Although Miss Leigh and Mr. Olivier are handsome young people, they hardly act their parts at all." Critics mostly pointed fingers at Olivier's direction and acting, but Bernard Grebanier said that Leigh had a "thin, shopgirl quality of voice." It was a devastating financial setback for the couple, who had poured nearly all of their savings—$40,000—into the project.
Olivier starred as Horatio Nelson and Leigh as Emma Hamilton in the 1941 picture That Hamilton Woman. It was one of several Hollywood productions meant to rally Americans for Britain during the wartime when the US had not yet joined. Even though it bombed in the US, the picture was a huge hit in the USSR. Following the screening, Winston Churchill addressed the audience and said, "Gentlemen, I thought this film would interest you, showing great events similar to those in which you have just been taking part." The Oliviers continued to be popular with Churchill, who invited them to dinners and events throughout his life. Regarding Leigh, he reportedly said, "By Jove, she's a clinker."
While the Oliviers were back in Britain in March of 1943, Leigh was performing in North Africa for the troops stationed there as part of a revue. Reportedly, she declined a $5,000 weekly studio contract to volunteer for the war effort. Before Leigh became sick with a severe cough and fevers, he performed for the troops. After spending a few weeks in the hospital after her 1944 diagnosis of TB in her left lung, she seemed to be on the mend. Leigh found out she was pregnant and subsequently had a miscarriage while filming Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). Leigh momentarily sank into a profound melancholy, reaching rock bottom as she collapsed to the floor, weeping uncontrollably. For someone with bipolar illness, this was the initial collapse among many. Leigh would have no recollection of the incident but would feel severely ashamed and guilty thereafter; Olivier eventually learned to recognize the signs of an approaching episode, which included hyperactivity for a few days, melancholy, and an abrupt collapse.
After receiving the go light from her doctor, Leigh returned to the acting world in 1946, appearing in a hit London production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. However, her films from this era, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and Anna Karenina (1948), did not fare very well at the box office. During this time, a Hollywood boycott of British films had a negative impact on all British films. Leigh went to Buckingham Palace with Olivier to see his investiture as a knight in 1947. Lady Olivier was her title. Lady Olivier was her social title after the couple's divorce, which was the same as the title a knight's ex-wife had.
To raise money for the Old Vic Theatre, which Olivier had joined the board of directors by 1948, he and Leigh went on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand. The School for Scandal, The Skin of Our Teeth, and Richard III were all films in which Olivier co-starred with Vivien Leigh. Despite Leigh's illness and the fact that she let her understudy perform in her stead for a week, the tour was a smashing success, and Olivier remarked on her "charming the press" skills. Company insiders remember many fights between the pair as Olivier grew progressively resentful of the tour's expectations. When Leigh's shoes went missing and she refused to perform without them, the situation escalated to a violent confrontation in Christchurch, New Zealand. Leigh, upset that he would openly strike her, slapped him back after Olivier struck her face and yelled an obscenity at her. A few moments later, she had "dried her tears and smiled brightly onstage" after making her way to the stage in borrowed pumps. After the tour was over, they were both sick and fatigued. Speaking to a journalist, Olivier said, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." He would later mention that he "lost Vivien" in Australia thereafter.
After the tour was a smashing success, the Oliviers decided to make their West End debut as a duo. They performed the same plays, but with the addition of Antigone, which Leigh insisted on having included since she wanted to portray a tragic character.
Acting in A Streetcar Named Desire from 1949 to 1951
After having seen Leigh in The School for Scandal and Antigone, Williams and the play's producer Irene Mayer Selznick cast her as Blanche DuBois in the West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Olivier had already committed to direct the show. The media's scrutiny of the play's appropriateness exacerbated Leigh's fears as it had explicit sexual content (rape scene) and allusions to homosexuality and promiscuity. Notwithstanding, she was certain about the work's significance.
After Streetcar's 1949 October opening on London's West End, J. Critic Kenneth Tynan, who would later disparage Leigh's stage performances, said that British actors were "too well-bred to emote effectively on stage," which led B. Priestley to criticize the play and Leigh's performance. Part of the play's financial success, according to Olivier and Leigh, was due to people going to witness what they thought would be a racy plot, rather than the Greek tragedy they had imagined. Noël Coward, who praised Leigh as "magnificent," was one of the play's staunch advocates.
Following her 326-performance run, Leigh was promptly cast to portray Blanche DuBois again in the stage adaptation. Olivier had trouble at first collaborating with director Elia Kazan, who was unhappy with the route Olivier had gone in creating Blanche, but her sardonic and sometimes racy sense of humor helped her connect with Marlon Brando. Though Kazan preferred Jessica Tandy and then Olivia de Havilland to Leigh, he was aware of her success as Blanche on stage in London. Although he initially did not think highly of her acting abilities, he eventually came to admire her "the greatest determination to excel of any actress I've known." Leigh described her time spent playing Blanche DuBois as "gruelling," telling the Los Angeles Times, "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me." Olivier accompanied her to Hollywood, where he co-starred with Jennifer Jones in William Wyler's Carrie (1952).
A Streetcar Named Desire was a huge success for Leigh, earning her a slew of accolades including two Best Actress Oscars, Best British Actress from BAFTA, and Best Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle. Leigh delivered "everything that I intended, and much that I had never dreamed of" to the character, according to Tennessee Williams. Blanche DuBois "tipped me over into madness," as Leigh later put it, and the actress had conflicting emotions about her role.
Mental illness was a major problem from 1951 to 1960.
By 1951, Leigh and Laurence Olivier had won rave reviews for their productions of Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw and Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare, which they alternated nightly in London. Into 1952, they brought the shows to New York and staged a run at the Ziegfeld Theatre. Even while the reviews were mostly good, reviewer Kenneth Tynan infuriated them by claiming that Leigh's skill was average and that Olivier had to sacrifice his own for her. Leigh, who was both afraid of failing and determined to achieve greatness, focused on Tynan's criticisms and disregarded the good feedback from other reviewers, nearly leading to another collapse.
Leigh and Peter Finch shot Elephant Walk in Ceylon in January 1953. She suffered a mental breakdown shortly after production began, prompting Paramount Pictures to cast Elizabeth Taylor in her stead. After Olivier brought her back to their British home, Leigh informed him that she had been having an affair with Finch and was madly in love with him, in between episodes of incoherence. She made a slow but steady recovery over the course of a few months. Many of the Oliviers' acquaintances found out about her issues because of this occurrence. According to David Niven, she was "quite, quite mad" at the time. That "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts" was something that surprised Noël Coward, according to his journal. Beginning in 1948, Leigh's love involvement with Finch fluctuated for a number of years before finally fading as her mental health worsened.
Not only that, in 1953 Leigh became well enough to star opposite Laurence Olivier in The Sleeping Prince; the next year, they staged a Shakespearean triple bill at Stratford-upon-Avon, performing Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and Twelfth Night. They performed to sold-out crowds and received mostly positive reviews; moreover, Leigh's health appeared to be steady. In his review of Twelfth Night, director John Gielgud said, "... perhaps I will still make a good thing of that divine play, especially if he will let me pull her little ladyship out of her timidity and safeness. He dares too confidently... but she hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique and doing anything that she has not killed the spontaneity of by overpractice." Leigh starred in Anatole Litvak's 1955 film The Deep Blue Sea, and her co-star Kenneth More felt they had poor chemistry while filming.
Leigh became pregnant in 1956 and had to withdraw from her part as the lead in South Sea Bubble, a Noël Coward comedy. She went into a depressive episode that lasted months after suffering a miscarriage a few weeks later. While touring Europe with Olivier in Titus Andronicus, Leigh's frequent tantrums against him and the rest of the group were a constant source of tension. Her ex-husband Leigh Holman remained with the Oliviers after their return to London and helped soothe her; he could still have a significant impact on her.
She became famous in 1959 with her performance in the Noël Coward comedy Look with Lulu!She is "beautiful, delectably cool and matter of fact, mistress of every situation," according to a Times critic.
Leigh started seeing actor John Merivale in 1960, when she thought her marriage was finished. Merivale knew about Leigh's health problems and promised Olivier that he would take care of her. She filed for a dissolution of her marriage to Olivier that year, and he promptly wed actress Joan Plowright. "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." (Olivier, autobiography, p. 148), describing the years of strain they had endured due to Leigh's illness. P.
Years 1961–1967: The End and Demise of an Era
Despite Leigh's outward happiness, Radie Harris cited her as saying, "would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him," illustrating how stabilizing Merivale was for her. Leigh Holman, her first husband, was also quite involved. From July 1961 through May 1962, Leigh and Merivale toured Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand, and Leigh got good reviews the whole time without having to share the limelight with Olivier. Nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1963 for her portrayal of Tovarich, she persevered in her stage career despite ongoing episodes of melancholy. In 1961, she was in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and in 1965, she was in Ship of Fools.
Ship of Fools, Leigh's final film role, was a triumph and a symbol of the diseases that were beginning to take hold of her. Stanley Kramer, the film's producer and director, had Leigh cast in the lead role before learning of her deteriorating mental and physical health. Kramer recalled her bravery in tackling the challenging role when the actress was ill, saying, "She was ill, and the courage to go ahead, the courage to make the film—was almost unbelievable." Leigh's performance had an air of paranoia, which led to tantrums that damaged her relationships with her co-stars, but Lee Marvin and Simone Signoret were understanding and sympathetic. During the attempted rape scenario, there was an odd incident when Leigh grew upset and struck Marvin so forcefully with a spiked shoe that it left a mark on his face. Ship of Fools was Leigh's breakout role, and she was named L'Étoile de Cristal for her outstanding performance.
Recurrence of Leigh's TB occurred in May 1967 when she was preparing to star opposite Michael Redgrave in A Delicate Balance, an Edward Albee play. There was an apparent improvement when she rested for a few weeks. As was his custom on the evening of July 7, 1967, Merivale went to participate in a play at their Eaton Square apartment. He got back to their flat shortly before midnight and found her asleep. On July 8, after waiting around for half an hour, he went into the bedroom and saw her lifeless body lying on the floor. She tried to get to the restroom but fainted and choked as her lungs filled with fluids. After Merivale reached out to her family, she was able to get in touch with Olivier, who was at a local hospital getting treatment for prostate cancer. When Olivier got to Leigh's house right away, he found Merivale had transferred her corpse onto the bed, causing him "grievous anguish" according to his account. Olivier helped Merivale with the burial arrangements after paying his respects and "stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us." He remained until her body was carried from the flat.
In the wake of the public announcement of her death on July 8, all of London's theaters went dark for one hour. St. Mary's Church on Cadogan Street in London was the site of Leigh's Catholic funeral. Famous people from the British entertainment industry were present during her burial. In accordance with her last will and testament, Leigh was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and her remains were dispersed on the lake at her holiday residence, Tickerage Mill, close to Blackboys in East Sussex, England. The funeral took place at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where John Gielgud delivered the eulogy. Upon receiving an honor from "The Friends of the Libraries at the University of Southern California" in 1968, Leigh made history as the first American actress to receive such recognition. The event served as a memorial service, with testimonials from friends and colleagues like George Cukor and screenings of Leigh's screen tests for Gone with the Wind—the first viewing of the tests in 30 years—during the ceremony.
The filmmakers who worked with Leigh often highlighted her stunning good looks, which contributed to her reputation as one of the most gorgeous actors of her day. In response to the question of whether her attractiveness had hindered her acting career, she stated, "People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act. And as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap, if you really want to look like the part you're playing, which isn't necessarily like you."
Director George Cukor characterized Leigh as a "consummate actress, hampered by beauty," while Laurence Olivier argued that critics should "give her credit for being an actress and not go on forever letting their judgments be distorted by her great beauty." Garson Kanin agreed with Olivier and Kanin described Leigh as "a stunner whose ravishing beauty often tended to obscure her staggering achievements as an actress." Great beauties aren't necessarily great actresses, he said, "simply because they don't need to be. Vivien was different; ambitious, persevering, serious, often inspired."
Leigh went on to say that she tried to master her trade and overcome bias by playing "as many different parts as possible." She felt that drama was easier to perform than humor due to the need for more accurate timing, and she advocated for a greater focus on comedy in acting instruction. As her career came to a close, which encompassed noël coward comedies as well as tragedies by Shakespeare, she made the observation, "It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh."
She became famous in Britain after her first performances, but outside of the country, she was mostly unknown until Gone with the Wind came out. As her star rose, Frank Nugent of The New York Times penned the following review of Miss Leigh's Scarlett: "Miss Leigh's Scarlett has vindicated the absurd talent quest that indirectly turned her up. She is so perfectly designed for the part by art and nature that any other actress in the role would be inconceivable" (December 1939). Time magazine even featured her on its cover as Scarlett. After praising Leigh for "the inspired casting" in 1969, reviewer Andrew Sarris went on to say in 1998 that "she lives in our minds and memories as a dynamic force rather than as a static presence" when asked about the film's popularity. Leonard Maltin, a cinema historian and critic, praised the picture as a classic and said that Leigh "brilliantly played" the part in a 1998 article.
Phyllis Hartnoll praised her performance in the West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire, calling it "proof of greater powers as an actress than she had hitherto shown," and it contributed to her long tenure as one of the best performers in British theater. "Two of the greatest performances ever put on film" were Leigh and Marlon Brando, according to Pauline Kael, who was critiquing the film adaptation that followed. Kael went on to say that Leigh's portrayal was "one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke both fear and pity."
Kenneth Tynan, who was her harshest critic, made fun of Leigh's performance in 1955's Titus Andronicus opposite Olivier, saying that she "receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber." Tynan also said that Leigh's 1955 Lady Macbeth was unconvincing and lacked the ferocity that the part required. Yet, upon her passing, Tynan changed his mind, calling his previous critique "one of the worst errors of judgment" he had ever committed. After seeing Leigh's version, he thought it "made more sense... than the usual battle-axe" depiction of the role, in which Lady Macbeth enthrals Macbeth with her sexual attraction. According to a poll of theater reviewers done soon after Leigh passed away, many of them selected her portrayal as Lady Macbeth as her crowning theatrical achievement.
In 1975's The Day of the Locust, 1976's Gable and Lombard, and 1980's The Scarlett O'Hara War, American actress Morgan Brittany played Leigh. In the 2011 film My Week with Marilyn, English actress Julia Ormond portrayed Leigh. Hollywood, a Netflix miniseries, also featured Katie McGuinness as Leigh (2020).
The Actors' Church, St. Paul's, Covent Garden, London commemorated Leigh with a plaque in 1969. Included in a set of British postage stamps commemorating "British Film Year" in 1985 was a portrait of her, with Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Sir Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers, and David Niven. Not only did she co-star with Sir Laurence Olivier on the April 1996 Centenary of Cinema stamp issue, but she was also a part of a series commemorating her birth's centennial in April 2013. After Olivier passed away in 1999, his papers were acquired by the British Library in London. Letters written by Leigh to Laurence Olivier are among the many personal files housed in the Laurence Olivier Archive. Mrs. Suzanne Farrington is the rightful owner of all of Leigh's documents, including her journals, pictures, contracts, and correspondence. The National Library of Australia acquired a picture album with the couple's 1948 Australian trip photos in 1994. The album was thought to have belonged to the Oliviers and included the monogram "L & V O." The photos included 573 snapshots of the honeymoon. It is now considered an important artifact in Australia's performing arts archive. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired an archive of Leigh's correspondence, journals, images, screenplays for films and plays with annotations, and a slew of accolades in 2013. In addition, the Royal Mail chose Leigh as one of 10 subjects for its 2013 commemorative "Great Britons" stamp series.