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Vivien Leigh Faces Her Biggest Fight

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In March 1953, Vivien Leigh suffered a total nervous breakdown due to exhaustion in Hollywood while working on the film Elephant Walk. Friends David Niven and Stewart Granger were there to witness the horrific event, and to assist in keeping Vivien safe until doctors could sedate her. Laurence Olivier came directly from Ischia where he was vacationing with the the Williams Waltons to be at Vivien’s side. His flight took three days, and once he arrived Vivien was immediately loaded onto a plane at LAX en route to New York and London. The world press chronicled the event, and years later, Olivier, Granger and Niven all wrote about it in their respective autobiographies. There was another person who also shared her opinion shortly after the event. Vivien’s daughter Suzanne Holman Farrington, then 19, wrote an article for the Sunday Chronicle in which she reflected on her mother’s situation and her own choices as an aspiring actress following in her mother’s footsteps.

Vivien Leigh Faces Her Biggest Fight

by Suzanne Holman
Sunday Chronicle, March 22, 1953

Next Tuesday evening I am going to seek out a quiet corner and, at the age of 19, take stock of my life.

For the misfortune that has come to my mother has made me ask myself this question: “Shall I go on with my dream of becoming a great actress or should I be wiser to take up a career where there may be no triumphs, but where there would certainly be fewer heartaches and tears?”

I must not think of making this vital decision until I have appeared at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s annual performance on Tuesday afternoon.

This is the climax of my two years’ study at the Academy. Although I shall not feel much in the mood for playing my part because of worry about my mother. I cannot quit at this point for the sake of the rest of the cast.

Always More

It was only sheer collapse that has forced my mother to give up–at least for the time being.

She has put tremendous energy into every stage and film role she ever played, and as the years passed she found that more and more calls were made on her services.

She was caught up in time schedules and felt, I know, that she could not stop or even let up for a while.

You can’t relax when you’re on top, as mother was.

In the last six months or so I could see she was living on her nervous energy. While she was as gay and vivacious as ever I could feel that she was driving herself too hard.

On top of this she had a horror of flying. That dates back some 12 years when she was flying with Sir Laurence Olivier from New York to London. The engines of the aircraft caught fire, and the plane had to make an emergency landing near Boston.

Breaking Point

Then came the 72-hour flight from Ceylon to Hollywood to complete the studio scenes on the film Elephant Walk. The ordeal of that flight was the breaking-point.

Now that she is back in London I feel sure that all she needs is a period of complete rest before she makes a complete recovery. Larry, of course, is wonderful.

When she is well again, she, too, may have a big decision to make. Will she take up her career or will she be content to rest on her laurels, as she can well afford to do?

But knowing mother as I do, I am sure she will make a supreme effort to appear in the West End with Sir Laurence in the new Rattigan Play “The Sleeping Prince.”

 ♠ ♣ ♠ ♣ ♠

Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait

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Vivien Leigh: On Interviewing a Star On a Wet Washington Day

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In 1966, Elaine Dundy (ex-wife of Kenneth Tynan) interviewed Vivien Leigh backstage at the National Theatre in Washington DC during the run of Ivanov. The article, in which Dundy describes being snubbed by a curiously closed-off Vivien, ran in The Village Voice. This is the companion piece to the previously unpublished interview by Richard F. Mason. It is interesting to look at them side-by-side as it shows either two critics with very different attitudes about the subject, or two very different Viviens. Thanks once again to Peter Coyne for submitting it to the site.

Ivanov Vivien Leigh John Gielgud

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Backstage with Vivien Leigh

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I was recently contacted about a never-before-published interview that Vivien Leigh had done in 1966 during the run of her last play, Ivanov, in which she co-starred with her good friend John Gielgud. Peter Coyne, a former student and good friend of the interviewer, Richard F. Mason, was kind enough to choose vivandlarry.com as the source of publication. He has written a marvelous introduction to the interview, as well as provided a scan of the letter Vivien sent to Mr. Mason in response. Thanks, Peter.

Richard F. Mason was a professor of drama and director of university theater productions at Hofstra University on Long Island from 1964 until 1993. I was his student there from 1977 until 1981, and his friend thereafter. He wrote the following interview with Vivien Leigh in 1966, when she was appearing in New York City in her last play, Ivanov. Mason was still fairly new to New York at that time, having recently moved into the Charles Street apartment in Greenwich Village where he would live until his dying day, November 26, 2010. Although he was already 37 years old at the time of the interview, there is still a touch of the “stage door Johnny” about him, even if one armed with a PhD. He often mentioned in later years, when recalling the experience, the degree to which he felt star-struck, and how his time with Vivien felt rather like being in a dream state. Writing was never as great a strength for him as teaching and directing were, yet he manages to be rather funny in his own very arch way (to me, at least), and Vivien herself says she was “delighted” with the result.

Since Mason frequently references in his interview a piece about Vivien Leigh written by Elaine Dundy that had just been published, a summary of that article might be helpful. It appeared in the Village Voice on May 5, 1966, under the headline, Vivien Leigh: On Interviewing a Star On a Wet Washington Day. Ms. Dundy describes the colorful roles Vivien has played, the exciting life she has lived, and labels her an “Adventuress.” She describes boarding the plane for Washington, hauling herself and her overnight gear through a D.C. downpour to get to the theater, all for what she labels a “Snub Interview.” Her greeting from the star: “‘Don’t come near me!’she cries out as I advance into the dressing room. ‘I’ve got a cold.’ (I mention this as the most gracious thing she will say to me in the next 20 minutes.)” Her Vivien emerges as not chatty, but catty. There is one hilarious moment: After a pause, Vivien says to the writer, “I loved that piece you wrote about Barbra Streisand.” Response: “I have never written about Barbra Streisand in my life.” In the end, Ms. Dundy must make due with terse, sometimes monosyllabic answers (“No.”) to her rather inane questions. She dashes for the last flight back to New York City instead of remaining in Washington overnight as planned, feeling very snubbed indeed.

Now, for a glimpse at a very different Vivien Leigh, as seen through the eyes of young Professor Mason in his heretofore unpublished interview. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

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Vivien Leigh’s favorite Siamese

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The Siamese Cat–A Popular Pet: “New” and its Celebrated Owner

Illustrated London News
March 13, 1948

 

Having "an outline of great beauty and eyes of brilliant blue," "New," a fine Siamese cat, poses for the camera and displays its "lucky charm" collar

Mr B.A. Sterling-Webb, Hon. Treasurer of the Siamese Cat Club, in “The World of Science” article writes of the Siamese cat that it “is easily the most distinctive and popular of all breeds, combining, as it does, a unique appearance with an intelligence of a very high order,” and describes its many charming characteristics. Here we reproduce photographs of a typical animal of the species with its owner, the celebrates actress and film-star, Miss Vivien Leigh (Lady Olivier). The cat was given to Miss Leigh three years ago. It became a popular figure at the Shepperton Studios during the 5 1/2 months it took to shoot the London Films production, Anna Karenina.

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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.