Vivien Leigh

From the moment one first sees Vivien standing on the windswept platform as the cameras roll for the burning of Atlanta, this book holds its audience spellbound through the final act. One of the most talented, beautiful and tormented actresses who ever captured the public imagination is brought into brilliant focus in this definitive, intimate portrait of her life--and of the glittering worlds in which she lived. We are shown the two deeply divided personalities that actually lay behind the legend: one, the charming, elegant, convent-schooled "perfect hostess" whose friends and admirers included almost everyone of distinction--Churchill, Coward, Williams, Brando, Selznick, Korda, Gielgud; the other, a self-destructive, spoiled, recklessly ambitious manic-depressive. Her scandalous love affair with Laurence Olivier was second in notoriety only to that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. We follow the events and the passions that marked Vivien's rise and fall: her aristocratic upbringing, her frustrating first marriage, her tempestuous courtship by Olivier, her dazzling rise to stardom as Scarlett O'Hara (and her innumerable other roles, from Cleopatra to Blanche DuBois), her glamorous social life that spanned the globe, her incapacitating realization that Olivier's greatness in the theater would always exceed her own, and her heartbreaking death from tuberculosis at age 53. Here is an extraordinarily complex woman brought vividly to life in this first complete biography. Given total access to Miss Leigh's personal letters, and working with the cooperation of those who had been closest to her, Anne Edwards has produced a frank, open book that does not spare the truth, yet is as romantic a canvas as any of the great films in which Vivien ever starred.--Adapted from dust jacket.