Of course, the one time Vivien Leigh played someone “normal,” she went insane.
Leigh specialized in portraying mad women: Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and the deranged and damaged Blanche du Bois from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But in 1953 she agreed to star in the movie “Elephant Walk,” about a young bride who follows her husband to Sri Lanka.
“Oh, the bliss of not having to go mad, commit suicide, or contemplate murder,” the 39-year-old actress told reporters at the time. “My character is … a normal healthy girl.” Two months later, she was in a mental asylum.
A new biography, “Where Madness Lies: The Double Life of Vivien Leigh,” by Lyndsy Spence (Pegasus Books, out Tuesday) chronicles Leigh’s harrowing descent into mental illness.
It focuses on the last 14 years of the “Gone With the Wind” actress’s life, starting with her breakdown in 1953.
Leigh already had two Oscars and was married to Laurence Olivier when she began shooting “Elephant Walk.”
But she had trouble getting decent scripts, and her marriage was falling apart — thanks to Olivier’s frequent infidelities and her bipolar disorder.
She spent much of the shoot in Sri Lanka sending Olivier “erratic” postcards. She stayed up late drinking and arrived on set bloated and tired.
She had a meltdown when the dresser tried to put her in shorts; “My legs are not designed for shorts,” the petite actress cried.
She threw herself into an affair with her leading man, the Australian actor Peter Finch, at times confusing him with her husband, calling him “Larry” and begging him to sleep with her.
Things got worse when the production moved to Hollywood. On the flight to Los Angeles, Leigh screamed that the wing was on fire and tried to jump out of the plane. She tore at her clothes and ripped her dress down the middle, fighting with Finch as the flight attendants restrained her and shoved sleeping pills down her throat.
Once in Tinsel Town, she burst into the bedroom Finch shared with his wife, Tamara, at 2 a.m., tore off the sheets, and screamed, “How could you be sleeping with her? You’re my lover.”
She cut Tamara’s clothes and threatened to kill the Finches’ 3-year-old daughter, Anita. (Leigh had a daughter with her first husband, Leigh Holman, in 1933, but she was never the maternal type: After giving birth she nicknamed the kid “Toosoon.”)
Paramount eventually booted Leigh off the picture, replacing her with Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier arrived to bring his troubled wife back to England — heavily sedated so she wouldn’t make a scene. “We’re really home, aren’t we?” she asked him when they arrived at Croydon Airport.
Instead, he dropped her off at Netherne Asylum. There, nurses stripped her of her clothes, induced her into a coma, and subjected her to ice baths.
She would periodically wake up to find herself strapped to a chair, receiving shocks of electroconvulsive therapy.
The ECT left her with singed hair and burn marks and affected her memory. When Olivier finally saw her again, weeks later, he was in shock. “The pale face, marked by the ECT, and the colorless eyes were that of a stranger,” Spence writes. He believed the treatment had robbed the “best parts” of her. “She was no longer the girl he fell in love with.”
They were both already married when they met in 1936. Leigh was 23; Olivier, was 29.
They carried on an affair for two years before running away together. “I was only half alive before I met Vivien,” Olivier said. She was beautiful, wild, passionate, and unpredictable.
In 1937, he cast her as Ophelia to his Hamlet, and she “flew at him like a demon” backstage. When she was filming “Gone With the Wind,” she would mail her used knickers to him in New York City. “I don’t suppose there ever was a couple so much in love,” he said when they finally got married in 1940. “Our love affair has been simply the most divine fairy tale, hasn’t it?” she replied.
If the ECT snuffed out something in Leigh, it did not necessarily “cure” her illness. She continued to have manic episodes — scrubbing walls, picking imaginary dirt off the floor, smashing windows, walking around naked, and throwing money out of windows.
She obsessed over Finch, stalking his family before he came crawling back to her. Olivier, meanwhile, slept with his co-stars. The pair tried to have a baby in a last-ditch attempt to save their union, but Leigh miscarried. They divorced in 1960.
Leigh eventually would go through five rounds of ECT. Yet despite her fragile state, she never stopped working. She did Shakespeare through Australia and South America.
She did a Broadway musical. During that exhausting run, in 1963, she cracked up on stage — breaking character and going into her co-star’s dressing room and tearing up his family photos. She died in 1967, at the age of 53, from tuberculosis.
She refused the doctors’ orders and continued to smoke and entertain guests from her bed.
The day after she died, Olivier came to her London flat to “pray for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us.”
“The only one I ever loved was Leigh,” he said later. He wasn’t alone.
