Category: vivien leigh

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Oscar Countdown: 1940

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It’s that time of year again: Oscar season. I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the televised ceremony because it keeps getting worse and worse every year, but I watch it anyway. I can’t help it (ad I’ll always remember the time I went up to LA to try and get a bleacher seat but ended up standing at the corner of Hollywood and Highland with a bunch of obnoxious and scary people for 11 hours)!   The Academy Awards are good for food, friends, fashion and frustration, in my opinion.

The Oliviers had four Oscars between them, 3 for acting and one for special achievement. For the next three days leading up to the Academy Awards ceremony, I thought it would be fun to go back in time and look at Larry and Vivien’s crowning cinematic achievements.

The glamorous days of pre-war Hollywood.  The scene: the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd. The occasion: The 12th annual Academy Awards celebrating the best in cinema.

1939 is considered by many to be Hollywood’s best year in terms of quality output. 10 films were nominated for the Best Picture prize that year (something the Academy reinstated in 2010), and what a selection! Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Dark Victory, Love Affair, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Of Mice and Men, and the biggest of them all, Gone with the Wind.

The competition in the Best Actor and Actress categories was equally as tough: Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Laurence Olivier, Robert Donat, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, and Greer Garson were all in the running. But as far as the Best Actress was concerned, none of the ladies listed above even came close to garnering as many votes as Vivien Leigh. The Hollywood newcomer was the belle of the ball when she turned up on the arm of producer David O. Selznick, leaving fiancee Laurence Olivier to escort her co-star Olivia DeHavilland (who was up for the Best Supporting Actress award).

Selznick and Vivien

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Destination: Eaton Square

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I met up with my friend Riikka today for lunch in Leicester Square. Our plan was to go see the High Society exhibit at the Wellcome Collection. But first, we decided to take a little detour to Eaton Square to snap some photos! This time, we didn’t even have to ask to go in the garden. The nice security guard asked if we wanted to go in and snap some photos. I think the people that patrol the area are a lot more friendly than the people who actually live there.

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Welcome to Theatreland!

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Having a day off from screenings and seminars, I decided to meander over to the West End and take photos of some of the places associated with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. 95% of the theatres they performed in are in walking distance from one another. Piccadilly and Soho are great areas in which to explore your photography skills because there are simply so many interesting things to see. Modern architecture meets centuries-old buildings; Chinatown backs up into Leicester Square; posh St James intermingles with the art district.  It’s a mish-mash of fabulosity, and I love exploring these sorts of places.

For those of you who are coming to the Weekend with the Oliviers event in May, these are some of the places I’m planning to take you to on our walking tour.  Enjoy the view of London’s theatreland!

Ambassadors Theatre, West Street. Vivien Leigh became an overnight sensation when she performed here in The Mask of Virtue in 1935

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Backstage with “The Happy Hypocrite”

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Theatre World goes backstage after the opening night of The Happy Hypocrite (1936) starring Ivor Novello, Vivien Leigh, Isabelle Jeans, and Marius Goring.

Ivor Novello was both amused and delighted to hear that he had so completely mystified the friends who crowded into his dressing room after his great first night triumph in The Happy Hypocrite at His majesty’s.  Many of them had thought he wore a mask when he made his first entry, but, actually, his startling transformation into the red-faced and bloated viciousness of “Lord George Hell” is due entirely to patient–and clever–make-up.  For the later scenes he had three different half-masks, which just leave his mouth and chin free, and, as he feels inclined at the moment, he wears one or other of them or else reveals his face.

He never puts on at all the complete mask which is brought on for the inspection in the early scene at the mask-maker’s shop.  Ivor, of course, had a special “cast” taken for this mask, and it seems to me that if only a supply of duplicates could be arranged they would be surely and eagerly bought up by his countless “fans.”

The youthful Vivien Leigh, who is such an adorable “Jenny Mere,” was proudly displaying for her dressing-room callers a gift from Ivor Novello of Coleridge’s poems bound in flame-coloured parchment.  She had a wonderful show of flowers, too, the most admired offering of all being a big oval mirror framed in closely-massed blue hyacinth blossoms and surmounted by a true lover’s knot of blue forget-me-nots and pink roses.  “And when the flowers die, what?–” began a practical friend; but before she could finish her query she got a poetically gallant reply from the young husband who had sent this gift to Vivien”  “Anyway, the mirror will always reflect a flower–my wife’s face,” he said.

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Vivien Leigh, the West End’s newest star

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“Words, but if one of them were true?”
by Vivien Leigh
The Theatre Illustrated Quarterly
Summer 1935

I have a pen in my hand.  It has started writing.  Why, only the Editor of this magazine and a stern-faced man called Sydney Carroll can explain.  I know I ought, when off the stage, to be invisible, to leave the world to guess my thoughts, if it wants to, which I hope, but doubt.  But as I respect my Manager and adore my theatre, and as I have a terrible fear of the press (though I think all pressmen dears, especially when they don’t ask me to talk about my baby), here I am, praying under my pen for just one smile and one word of forgiveness for stealing, with their interests in mind, into the greater limelight of the printed word.
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