The writers of Feud: Bette and Joan are working on a movie about the life of Vivien Leigh, star of A Streetcar Named Desire and Gone With the Wind. Better watch out for Olivia de Havilland this time!
That’s according to Variety, which reports that Michael Zam and Jaffe Cohen “will adapt the feature from Hugo Vickers’ ‘Vivien Leigh: A Biography.’ The film will focus on the life of the actress and her relationship with Laurence Olivier, who was her spouse from 1940 to 1960.” A cache of very passionate letters between the two was made public in 2015—“I woke up absolutely raging with desire for you”—but the relationship was a tumultuous one.
Recently, an auction of Leigh’s effects at Sotheby’s offered a peak into the star’s life. The Guardian did a piece spotlighting her library in particular:
The library, on the market 50 years after Leigh’s death from tuberculosis, reveals her to have been a bibliophile of wide taste that ranged from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, to Evelyn Waugh, who inscribed her copy of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: “For Vivien, this sad little chapter of my life. With love from Evelyn.”
The collection also reveals Leigh to have been at the centre of intellectual and literary circles in mid-20th-century London and not just as one half of the most glamorous couple in theatre. George Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward and Orson Welles, who decorated a gift of Barbara Jones’s The Unsophisticated Arts with a drawing of a face and a pierced heart, are among those who wrote personal messages in her books.
As long as they don’t omit her cats.
DISCUSSION
I always thought it was so unfortunate that she and Olivier never had children, because they were both absolute smokeshows, and a combination of their DNA could have only improved the world, at least aesthetically. Olivier’s younger photos always evoke that sort of devastating, utterly masculine kind of handsome that Henry Cavill is to me, and Leigh always had those eyes that you couldn’t look away from.