Vivien Leigh TIMELINE / March

March-September 1948: Tour of Australia and New Zealand with Old Vic Company.

March 1939 - John Gliddon discovered that Vivien Leigh had signed up with Myron Selznick.

March 4, 1942 The play "The doctor's dilemma" was opened

March, 1959 The television production of "The Skin Of Our Teeth" was opened

March 18, 1963 The play "Tovarich" was opened

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ABOUT VIVIEN LEIGH

Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (real name Vivian Mary Hartley) was a legendary beauty whose film fame rests largely on her two Oscar-winning US roles: in Gone with the Wind (1939) and in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Trained at RADA, she always claimed the stage (debut 1935) as her first allegiance, though the jury remained divided about her work in classical drama.

She entered films in 1935, getting her first major chance in Fire Over England (1937), as romantic interest of future husband Laurence Olivier, and then was vivid enough in several late 1930s films of which the best remembered is A Yank at Oxford (1937).

There were romantic-tragic successes in two US films - Waterloo Bridge (1940) and That Hamilton Woman (1941) - but her postwar British films saw her unequal to the demands of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Anna Karenina (1948) and The Deep Blue Sea (1955).

Also Vivien Leigh was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. She played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress, but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult life, she gained a reputation for being a difficult person to work with, and her career went through periods of decline. She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in 1960, and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis.