Made immortal by her role of Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951, British stage and film actress Vivien Leigh was born on November 5, 1913. The recipient of two Academy Awards for Best Actress for her performances in the aforementioned films, she also won a Tone for her work in the Broadway musical version of Tovarich in 1963.
The actress essayed a number of roles both on screen as well as in theatre, including characters such as Ophelia, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. She breathed her last in 1967, at the age of 53 and suffered from tuberculosis.
On the actor's 106th birth anniversary, here's looking at a few interesting facts about her:
1. Leigh was born in British India on the campus of St Paul's School in Darjeeling, in the then Bengal Presidency.
2. At the age of three, young Vivien made her first stage appearance for her mother's amateur theatre group, reciting 'Little Bo Peep'.
3. Her maternal name was Vivien Mary Hartley, but when she first entered films, she took on the name Vivien Leigh. Leigh was the surname of her first husband, barrister Herbert Leigh Holman.
4. Leigh's first film role was as a schoolgirl in the film Things Are Looking Up, albeit as an unaccredited extra.
5. It was in the play The Mask of Virtue, directed by Sidney Carroll in 1935, that Laurence Olivier saw Leigh and they soon began an affair while acting as lovers in Fire Over England (1937).
6. Leigh won the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone With The Wind over other famed actors like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn and Paulette Goddard.
7. On 31 August 1940, Olivier and Leigh were married at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California with Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin acting as their witnesses.
8. It was during the filming of the famous Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) when Leigh discovered she was pregnant with Olivier’s child. However, the actor suffered a miscarriage due to an accident on the sets.
9. While Leigh had won her first Oscar for Gone With The Wind, her second Academy Award came from playing Blanche DuBois, a southern belle in A Streetcar Named Desire.
10. In 1960 she and Olivier divorced and Olivier married actress Joan Plowright.
11. Leigh's last screen appearance was in Ship of Fools and she passed away during the night of July in 1967, when actor Jack Merivale, with whom she was in a relationship at that time, returned home from performance to find her asleep. Half an hour later, he found her body on the floor, her lungs had filled with liquid, suffocating her.
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