Every great Hollywood star is both an actor and the embodiment of a myth. Film transforms them, turning their selves, their presence, their talents, into an individual archetypal narrative, one seen in their films but also in the public knowledge of their private lives: wounded Monroe; malleable Audrey Hepburn; James Stewart, the irascible, increasingly neurotic all-American guy. Vivien Leigh is one of Britain’s few genuine women “movie stars”; her myth is memorable and dark, her life a rise and fall story, centred on the consequences of what was then called her “manic depression” — around her vulnerability, her promiscuity, her ageing. Her films themselves similarly want to tell us stories about suffering and resilience, about surviving and about being punished for doing so.
Leigh was born a hundred years ago,in November 1913, in Darjeeling. A pukka colonial childhood was followed by boarding-school exile in England, and her catching the theatre bug. At 19 her ambition was hardly deflected by an early marriage and motherhood — in her diary, she laconically noted “Had a baby — a girl”.She was learning acting on her feet, changing herself into something remarkable. But still her early films are all forgettably average; only a devotee could detect traces of a future Blanche DuBois in them. In the benign if dull Elizabethan swashbuckler “Fire Over England” (1937) she plays opposite Laurence Olivier for the first time. The two had just fallen in love, but any expectation that the film might contain Bogart-and-Bacall-style fireworks soon fizzles out. Leigh has little to do but run about or pine, a petulant source of frustrated energy.
But only a year later, there are signs of greatness. “St Martin’s Lane” (1938) enacts a parable of fame, fixed on the greasepaint ambitions of London’s theatreland. Leigh plays Libby, short for Liberty (“like the Statue”, she helpfully informs us). In analysing Liberty’s path from street busker to potential movie star, the film shows the men around her wanting to market a freshness felt in her, one that they immediately treat as suspect as soon as it is successfully being sold. A double bind traps Libby: she is deemed authentic, but duplicitous; frail, but mercenary. The film wonders whether she wouldn’t have been better off never making it, choosing to loiter instead with her platonic mate and fellow busker, Charles Laughton, rather than flirting with Rex Harrison and aristocratic stage-door Johnnies. Leigh and Laughton here are beauty and the beast, Esmeralda and the hunchback. They are like playful children: Laughton seems an overgrown boy, brimming with sweaty self-belief; while, in her beret, shirt and tie, there is something schoolgirlish about Leigh.
Leigh’s corblimey Cockney accent proves considerably less convincing than would Scarlett O’Hara’s Georgia drawl; it is an enacted Englishness. With its no-nonsense nostalgia for the gutter, “St Martin’s Lane” clings to a light-hearted pessimism: “Everything’s luck and good temper ... and if you can take a joke,” booms Laughton with bullish stoicism, before tacking on the glum coda “the whole of life’s a joke”. This grimly chipper mood was the nearest Britain got to the can-do optimistic gleam offered by Hollywood and “Gone With the Wind”.
After some 200 other women had been rejected, the quest to find an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara, the resourceful leading lady, ended with Leigh. The story goes that David O. Selznick, the film’s producer, was introduced to her while around them Atlanta (or the derelict buildings that stood in for it) burnt. Selznick knew at once he had found his heroine. This flame-surrounded story sounds contrived, and in a sense it was — the meeting was likely engineered by Leigh’s agent, who was also Selznick’s brother. But as a legend it is entirely apt for “Gone With the Wind”, itself a mingling of over-the-top spectacle, spontaneous passion and conscious artfulness.
“Gone With the Wind” has been re-released in a digital restoration as the centrepiece of the BFI Vivien Leigh season. Its magnolia blossoms and blazing sunsets will look even more gloriously, perniciously seductive. There is some truth in the idea that it is Leigh’s film and that its beguiling unreality best answers to her screen persona. Like Liberty, Scarlett O’Hara is a schemer, another survivor. Leigh is one actress playing another — pulling faces, looking sulky, producing at will those incorrigible dimples. There is much wrong with “Gone With the Wind” — its racial politics, its slippery view of American civil war history, its mingled adoration and frustrated hostility towards its heroine. Yet, for all this, it remains one of the most vital, entertaining and enchantingly beautiful of all classic Hollywood films — and, more than anything else, its life stems from the mercurial verve of Leigh’s performance.
With Olivier and Leigh having divorced their respective spouses, for a long time she was absorbed into the smiling public image of “the Oliviers”, in love and famous for it, a sanctified, theatrical showcase of a marriage. Unsurprisingly Olivier often wanted to play opposite her; Leigh might have made a fantastic Cathy in William Wyler’s “Wuthering Heights” (1939), but, if she and Olivier had got their way, would have been terribly miscast as the gauche second Mrs De Winter in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940).
Instead she took the role of ballet dancer Myra Lester in Mervyn LeRoy’s “Waterloo Bridge” (1940). This was a three-hankie First World War weepy that proceeds like a Hardyesque “Satire of Circumstance”, a sick joke about providence, luck and doom. It presents a somewhat muffed debate about the value of living life on any terms — Robert Taylor’s inexplicably Americanised Scot affirming an enraptured optimism against Leigh’s downbeat English assumption that what can go wrong will go wrong. In plot terms, Leigh’s pessimism would appear to win out. Through one terrible mistake (the misinformation that Taylor has been killed at the front) and one masochistically obtuse scene of cross purposes between Myra and her fiancé’s mother, the heroine’s life plunges into poverty and prostitution. When Taylor unexpectedly returns, Leigh hopes that she can pick up where she left off. Only of course she cannot; she is a fallen woman and, as such, there is only one thing to be done with her. Myra’s sin is one that cannot speak its name; no one ever explicitly mentions how Myra has been paying the rent. “You don’t have to tell me,” moans Taylor, when the penny finally drops.
It is all desperately sad, and yet somehow the film wants Taylor’s bright sense of life’s possibilities to survive even losing Myra. At the start of another world war, he is left behind to walk Waterloo Bridge again, to shed a nostalgic tear and summon up a resolute half-smile of remembrance. For ultimately, the film is happy to consign fallen Myra to suicide. It enjoys her defeat by letting us wallow in it; her extinction is sentimental, accompanied by the sweetness of a tear.
This was Leigh’s favourite role, and is certainly one of the most significant. There are few of her films that so clearly express the contradictions of her essential myth. Here the strong investment in her intrinsic innocence mingles most obviously with the horror that she is in fact “corrupt”. The film plays on the undeniable appeal of her freshness, but shows it becoming jaded. Ballet is the perfect medium for young Myra, and for Leigh; it is a physical art dependent on hard graft, control and strength that must give the appearance of an effortlessly ethereal delicacy. Like a film star, Myra moves from a performance of gracious prettiness, adored and remote from earthly concerns, to an assumption that she is available for any man, and as such is worthless, unless redeemed by self-destruction. Leigh’s genius was to embody a startling vivacity, a quality of naturalness; yet it was also always apparent that this “naturalness” was also a performance, an artful exposure of the real self. Like all stars, she was a published person. “Waterloo Bridge” is an actress’s film that exposes the contradictions in the public consumption of Hollywood’s great women stars.
The ironies of her position were next best expressed in the British-produced adaptation of “Anna Karenina” (1948). By rights, this really ought to have been a fantastic film. It was shot by the gifted Henri Alekan, who had only recently photographed Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bête”; one of the period’s great French filmmakers, Julien Duvivier, directed; Constant Lambert wrote the music; Jean Anouilh collaborated on the script. And at the centre of it all is Leigh at her very best.
Yet the film fails to be great. It is not its heaviness that mars it — for central to its meaning is a woman cushioned and trapped by brocade, antimacassars and frills, the ceilinged sets deepening the sense of confinement. Ultimately it is wrecked by the miscasting of stolid, uncharismatic Kieron Moore as Leigh’s lover. Without his hussar’s moustache, he would look a little like George Cole. Though too old, Olivier would have been infinitely better. By this point, Peter Finch, Leigh’s new lover, could have brought much more to the part, and Olivier might more suitably have been cast as the cuckolded Karenin (a role that fell instead to his great friend Ralph Richardson). Art was imitating life; the Leigh myth was melding together the screen and the gossip columns.
Three years later, she would up her game once more by playing Blanche DuBois in Elia Kazan’s version of “A Streetcar Named Desire”. It is simply one of the greatest pieces of acting in any American film; no Oscar was ever more deserved. Leigh had lived to unite in one career the acting styles of two distinct worlds — moving from dinner-jacketed Rex Harrison suavely proffering his cigarette-case all the way to Marlon Brando bellowing in a ripped T-shirt. She had passed from urbane theatricality to passion and “the authentic”. (Olivier would have to wait years before following her by playing Archie Rice in John Osborne’s “The Entertainer”.)
There can hardly have been two such different southern belles as Leigh’s two Oscar-winning performances as Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois; not least in the fact that, as Leigh herself pointed out, where one survives, the other goes under. With Blanche, Leigh finds a space for insecurity, for her elusive sense of failure. She seemed to be putting her disintegration on screen; Leigh is felt to suffer as Blanche suffers. To play with her persona, with her talent, was a high-risk activity but also a sign of things to come.
As happened to Montgomery Clift, her (too few) last films became preoccupied with the wreck of her once astonishing beauty. Yet the long tailing-off of her career should not conceal that she continued to be a great actor to the end of her life, or that, for a while, she had brilliantly held together in art the contradictions both of her own personality and of every beloved and envied, desired and condemned Hollywood star.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
