She Played Scarlett O’Hara. She Never Escaped Her. The Hidden Life of Vivien Leigh

She Played Scarlett O’Hara. She Never Escaped Her. The Hidden Life of Vivien Leigh 

There is a photograph taken approximately 3 days before Vivian Lee died. She is in her London flat in Eaton Square, Belgravia. She is 53 years old. She is wearing something casual, the kind of clothing you wear when you are not performing for anyone. Her face is thin. Her eyes are the same extraordinary green that had made every director who photographed them reach for better lighting. She looks like herself.

and she looks like someone who knows that she is running out of time. She died on the 7th of July 1967. Jack Maraveail, the man who had loved her in the years after her marriage ended, who had stayed when staying was genuinely difficult, who had been the person in her life that grief had not yet managed to remove, found her on the floor of her flat in the night.

 She had gotten out of bed. She had not made it back. She was alone when she died, not alone in the building. Maravel was there, but alone in the specific irreducible sense of dying in the dark on the floor without the person you had built your life around being the person who was there at the end. That person was in his second marriage.

 He had been married to someone else for 6 years by the time Vivien Lei died on the floor of her flat in Belgravia. He wept when he was told he had left her 7 years before the night she died. left her for a woman 21 years younger, left her after 20 years of a marriage that the world had described as the greatest love story in the English-speaking theater.

 Left her after 20 years of watching her illness consume what the world had called her talent and what she had called her life. He had married Joan Plowight 3 and 1/2 months after the divorce was finalized. 3 and 1/2 months. Vivien Lee had played every great role in the English and American theatrical cannon.

 She had won two Academy Awards more than almost anyone of her generation. She had been Scarlett O’Hara, the most iconic performance in the history of American cinema. She had been Blanch Dubois, the woman descending into madness in the play that Tennessee Williams had written as though he had watched Vivian Lee specifically and built the role around what he saw.

 She had been Scarlet, and she had been Blanch, and she had been herself, a woman whose mind moved between extraordinary clarity and consuming darkness without warning or pattern, who had undergone electroconvulsive therapy multiple times, and lost pieces of her memory to it each time, who had tuberculosis that she knew was advancing, and refused to stop working against medical advice, who had loved one man with the specific consuming totality of someone who had no other setting for love and she had died on the floor of her flat at 53 years old

found in the night. I am Mary and today this channel is going to tell you the story of Viven Lee that the mythology of Gone with the Wind has never made room for not Scarlett O’Hara. Viven Lee, the person who lived inside the performance. Stay with me because by the end of this video, the most famous green eyes in the history of cinema will mean something different to you than they did at the beginning is greater than before Gone with the Wind.

 Before the role that made her the most famous actress in the world, before Lawrence Olivier and before the illness and before any of the rest of it, there was a girl born in Dargiling, British India, who was educated in convents across Europe and who understood from her earliest years what it meant to perform a version of yourself for an audience that expected a specific thing.

 What Vivien Lee learned in those years and what she carried from them into the life and the career and the marriage that followed is the foundation of everything that is coming. The girl from Dargiling, Vivian Mary Hartley was born on the 5th of November 1913 in Dargiling in what was then British India. Her father Ernest Hartley was an English businessman.

 Her mother Gertrude was a woman of mixed Irish and French ancestry whose Catholicism was deep and whose romanticism her daughter would inherit it in a form that amplified everything was the most visible quality in the house. Dargiling in 1913 was a specific world. The hill station above the Himalayan foothills, the place where the British colonial administration sent its families to escape the Bengal plains heat.

 the place where the British Empire maintained its most polished performances of itself at the furthest possible distance from the country it had come from. Vivien grew up in that world, a world that ran on performance, on the maintenance of appearances, on the specific colonial grammar of presenting yourself correctly for the audience of people who were watching.

 She was sent to England for school at age six. The convent of the Sacred Heart at Roampton, a school that produced in the specific designed way of Catholic institutions for girls of a certain class, women who were poised, who were devout in the performed sense, who understood how to move through rooms of important people without appearing to try.

 Vivien was brilliant at this, not because the convent taught her, though it did, but because she had been practicing since Dariling. The performance of the correct version of yourself for the benefit of whoever is watching was not something Vivien learned. It was something she arrived with, refined, and eventually turned into the most celebrated acting career of her generation.

 She was also from very early physically extraordinary. The eyes green, specific, the kind of eyes that photographers described as a technical problem because they did not photograph the way ordinary eyes photographed were there from the beginning. The bone structure, the specific luminous quality that made directors reach for better lighting, not to create an effect, but to catch what was already there.

 She went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1932. She was 19 years old. She met Herbert Lee Hullman on the steps of a ski slope in Switzerland. He was a barristister. He was 13 years older. He was not theatrical, not artistic, not part of the world she was heading into, which was part of the appeal. He represented something stable, something outside the performance.

 They married in December 1932. Their daughter Suzanne was born in October 1933. And here is what the accounts of Viven’s early marriage document with a consistency that her mythology tends to smooth over. She was not, in the fundamental sense of the word, a mother in the way that the era expected. Suzanne was largely raised by her father and by the domestic arrangements that the Holman household could manage.

 Viven was working. Viven was auditioning. Viven was pursuing the career that she understood with complete clarity and without apology to be the most important thing in her life. This is not a criticism. It is a documented fact about a woman who knew what she wanted and pursued it in an era that did not make the pursuit easy.

 But it is also the first indication of something that would recur throughout her life. the specific documented pattern of Vivien Lee making choices about what she was not willing to sacrifice for the performance of the life that was expected of her. She was not going to sacrifice the career. She was not going to sacrifice the love when it came and when it came it came in the form of Lawrence Olivier at a film studio in 1935 and it reorganized everything is greater than.

 Lawrence Olivier was already married when Vivian Lee met him. She was already married. Both of them left their spouses. Both of them pursued each other with the specific consuming intensity of people who believed they had found something they could not survive walking away from. What that pursuit looked like from the inside and what the 20-year marriage that followed revealed about what it had actually been built on is the part of the Le Olivier story that the mythology has always gotten slightly wrong. That is coming.

 Olivier and the marriage. Lawrence Olivier was by 1935 already one of the most celebrated young actors in England. He was 28 years old. He was married to Jill Esmond, a respected actress who had sacrificed significant professional momentum to support his career. He was handsome in the specific classical way that the English stage valued bone structure, bearing, a voice that made the back rows of a theater feel spoken to personally.

He met Vivian Lee on the set of Fire Over England. What happened between them, what the accounts of people who were present describe, was not gradual. It was not the careful building thing of two people cautiously discovering each other. It was immediate. It was total. And it was from the perspective of the spouses both of them were married to, not hidden very carefully.

 Vivien left Lee Holman. Olivier left Jill Esmond. They lived together through the years when living together outside of marriage was still the subject of the specific public disapproval of a British society that managed its moral expectations through the press rather than through individual conversations. They married on the 31st of August 1940 in Santa Barbara, California in the interval between theatrical engagements.

 During the period when both of them were establishing their careers on both sides of the Atlantic, the marriage that followed was 20 years of what the world described as the most glamorous theatrical partnership in the English-speaking world. And it was also 20 years of something else, something the mythology has acknowledged but never fully examined.

 The illness had been there from early, the mood episodes, the cycling between the manic intensity that made Viven’s performances electric and that made her private behavior during those periods alarming and the depressive episodes that put her to bed for weeks at a cycle time that made the woman who had been performing Scarlet O’Hara for the cameras unable to speak, unable to move, unable to do anything except wait for it to pass.

 Olivier managed it. This is the word that his own accounts use, manage. He managed her illness the way a very capable, very determined person manages something that is beyond the conventional tools of management through presence, through force of will, through the specific exhausting work of being the person who is always watching for the signs that an episode was beginning.

 And during the manic episodes, when the illness produced in Viven a heightened sexuality, an impulse toward risk, a quality of abandon that the people who witnessed it described with a consistent mixture of fascination and alarm. Olivier was required to be something he had not signed up to be, not just a husband, not just a partner, something closer to a keeper.

 He has written about this in his autobiography. The accounts are honest in a way that makes them uncomfortable. honest about his own limitations, about the exhaustion, about the moments when he looked at the woman he had loved with total certainty and could not recognize her through what the illness was producing.

 The ECT began in the early 1950s. In 1953, during the production of Elephant Walk filming in Sri Lanka, Viven had a major breakdown. She believed during the episode that she was Lauren Beall. She was not reachable by the people around her in the way that a person not in the grip of a severe manic episode is reachable.

 She was replaced in the film by Elizabeth Taylor. She was flown to London. She was admitted to Nean Hospital in Surrey and there under the medical practice of the era which had not yet developed the pharmacological tools that would eventually make electrocomvulsive therapy a last resort rather than a primary treatment for severe bipolar disorder.

 She was given ECT multiple rounds. What ect does, what it did to Vivien Lee, what she described in letters and in conversations with her closest friends is erase not everything, not permanently, but in the specific cumulative way of a procedure applied repeatedly over years. It erased portions of her memory. It erased in her account specific performances, specific conversations, specific moments with specific people that she would reach for afterward and find that the reaching produced nothing.

 The performance was intact. The technical skill, the voice, the physical instrument of her craft. These the ect did not take. What it took was more interior, more specifically hers, the texture of her own past as she had experienced it. She described waking after ECT and not knowing where she was, not knowing for the moments before full consciousness returned, who she was, and then returning and understanding what had been taken and going back to work.

Because Vivian Lee, in the face of the illness and the ECT and the tuberculosis that had been diagnosed in 1945 and that the doctors kept telling her was advancing, went back to work every time. Olivier watched this for 20 years. And in 1960, he told her he was leaving. He had been in love with Joan Plowight, an actress 21 years younger than Viven, a member of the company at the Royal Court Theater, a woman whose youth and health and uncomplicated presence must have been after 20 years of managing Viven’s illness, something that felt like

relief. He told Vivien in December 1960, “She wept for days.” This is documented by Olivier himself and by the friends who were present during that period. She begged him not to go. Not in a manipulative way, not in the performed way of someone who has calculated what the scene requires, but in the specific unmanaged way of someone from whom the thing that had organized their life for 20 years was being removed. He left.

 He married Joan Plowight on the 17th of March 1961. 3 and 1/2 months after the divorce was finalized. Three and a half months is greater than Gone with the Wind was the role that made Vivian Lee the most famous actress in the world. It was also by the accounts of people who knew her most closely the role that established the specific grinding pattern of her career.

 The extraordinary performance extracted at extraordinary personal cost. What the filming of Gone with the Wind actually looked like from the inside. The relationship with Clark Gable. The relationship with the director, the physical and psychological toll of 125 days of Scarlet is the part of the GWTW story that the mythology of the film has never made room for that is coming. Scarlet O’Hara.

 The search for Scarlett O’Hara was the most publicized casting process in the history of Hollywood. David O. Selnik, the producer who had acquired the rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel and who was determined to make the film that the novel’s extraordinary commercial success demanded, tested more than 1,400 actresses.

 The search had been running for 2 years. By the time Vivian Lee arrived in Los Angeles in December 1938, having flown from London with Olivier, who was filming Wthering Heights, she was 25 years old. She was British, which Selnic had been told repeatedly, and with conviction the American South would not accept for Scarlet. She was relatively unknown in America, which the studio executives who had been lobbying for their own contract players found convenient.

 She was exactly what she was, the most beautiful actress in England, possessed of a technical intelligence that the screen tests confirmed was precisely suited to the specific demands of what Selnik was trying to make. He cast her. And the filming of Gone with the Wind, which began in January 1939 and ran for 125 days of principal photography, was by every account that exists from every person who was present during it.

 An experience that extracted something from Vivian Lee that she was never fully given back. Now, here is the detail about the production that the mythology of the film tends to organize around the wrong center. George Cucor was the original director. George Cukor, who had worked with Viven on the screen tests, who understood what she was capable of, who had built a working relationship with her during the pre-production period that she trusted, was fired 2 weeks into principal photography.

 Clark Gable fired him. The specific reasons Gable gave were professional. The specific reasons that circulated among the people who knew the production were more personal related to Cukor’s homosexuality and Gable’s discomfort with it. Though the full account of what passed between them has never been confirmed definitively.

 Viven was not asked. Viven was not consulted. Viven whose working relationship with Kukor was the most important creative partnership she had established for the production was simply told that her director had been replaced. She was devastated. This is documented by multiple people who were present during the production.

 She believed Kukor was the only director who fully understood what she was doing with Scarlet, who understood the specific interior complexity of a character that the studio wanted played primarily as a beauty and that Viven was determined to play as a woman with a complicated, frequently unlovable interior. Victor Fleming replaced Kukor.

 Viven kept meeting with Kukor privately in secret to work on the role. This has been confirmed by multiple sources. She and Olivia Dehavland, who had her own difficulties with the production, continued to receive coaching from Kukor outside of official filming. And her relationship with Clark Gable, which the mythology of the film describes as the great screen chemistry of its era, was in the actual working environment of the set more complicated.

 Gable was not cruel to Viven. He was not unkind. He was a professional of considerable experience and he behaved professionally but he was not warm. The specific tension between them documented in the accounts of people who worked on the production was the tension of two very different approaches to the craft existing in close proximity under enormous pressure.

 Gable worked by instinct, [music] by physical presence, by the specific untrained magnetism that his particular star power produced. Viven worked by thought, by analysis, by the specific, rigorous preparation of someone who had trained at Rada and who believed that every choice in a performance should be deliberate. They respected each other in the way that very different professionals respect each other, with the recognition that what the other person was doing worked, and without the warmth that similarity of approach might have produced. There

were scenes, the kissing scenes specifically, where Gable’s discomfort was visible to the crew. This has been documented. The specific cause of his discomfort varies across accounts. Some suggest it was related to the physical demand of the scenes. Some suggest it was a more general discomfort with the intimacy that the role required.

 Viven worked through it. Vivien worked through everything through Cuko’s removal, through the tension with Gable, through the physical exhaustion of 125 days of some of the most technically demanding performance work of her generation. She delivered Scarlett O’Hara and she won the Academy Award for best actress.

 At the 12th ceremony in February 1940, she was the most famous actress in the world. And here is what the fame produced in the specific way that fame produced things in 1939 for a woman who had not yet been diagnosed with the illness that was already operating inside her. It produced the role becoming the thing people expected her to be forever.

 Scarlett O’Hara, not Vivien Lee, not the woman who had trained at Rada, who had taken Shakespeare to theaters that had never had Shakespeare before, who had played Blanch Dubois with a specificity that Tennessee Williams described as the most perfect performance of anything he had ever written. Scarlet O’Hara. The role she had made immortal had made her its prisoner, and she spent the rest of her life trying to escape it through Shakespeare, through theater, through the roles she chose, specifically because they were nothing like Scarlet,

while the world kept returning her to the green velvet dress and the iron will and the red Georgia clay. Frankly, my dear, she had built a character that the world would never let her leave is greater than in 1,951, Vivien Lee played Blanch Dubois in the film adaptation of a street car name Named Desire.

 It was the role that won her second Academy Award. It was also by her own account and by the account of everyone who knew her during and after the production, the role that took something from her that she never recovered. Why a woman already struggling with a mental illness chose to inhabit the most famous portrait of mental collapse in American drama and what that choice reveals about who Vivian Lee actually was is coming.

Blanch Dubois Tennessee Williams wrote a street car named Desire in 1947. The play is about Blanch Dubois, a woman from the decayed southern aristocracy who arrives at her sister’s apartment in New Orleans carrying the full unbearable weight of everything she has lost and the performance of a person who has not lost any of it.

 who constructs in real time in front of an audience the elaborate fiction of a woman who is fine, who is more than fine, who is refinement itself, who is the last surviving representative of everything graceful and beautiful and above the brutality of the world she now finds herself living in. and who is not fine. Who is underneath every layer of the performance a woman whose mind is fracturing slowly, then quickly, then all at once under the specific cumulative weight of what she has been required to carry and what she has been required to pretend she is not carrying.

Ellia Kazan directed the film. He cast Vivien Lee as Blanch. And here is what everyone who was close to Vivien Olivier, her friends, the people who had watched the manic episodes and the ECT and the tuberculosis and the grinding cycle of her illness knew about that casting. Vivien was not performing Blanch Dubois.

 She was playing herself, not in the superficial sense that the role was biographical, not in the sense that her specific circumstances matched Blanch’s, but in the deep structural sense that what Blanch Dubois experiences in that play, the fracturing, the gap between performance and interior reality, the specific exhaustion of maintaining the surface, while the surface becomes increasingly unsustainable, was the lived experience of Vivian Lee’s relationship with her own mind. She knew this.

 The accounts of her conversations during the production with Kazan, with her co-stars, with Olivier confirm that she was fully lucidly aware of what she was doing. She was not losing herself in the role in the way that the mythology of acting collapses sometimes suggests. She was choosing to go somewhere with full knowledge of the terrain because she was the only person in the world qualified to make that particular journey.

 Marlon Brando Vas Stanley Kavalsski. The relationship between Brando and Lee during production was the relationship between two completely incompatible approaches to the craft existing at the highest possible level of technical accomplishment. Brando worked from the method, from impulse, from the body, from the specific unpredictable present tense reality of what the scene produced in him in the moment.

 Vivien worked from preparation from the architecture of the performance built carefully in advance executed with precision. They were extraordinary together. They were also by the accounts of people on the set genuinely difficult for each other. Not personally, not in any animousdriven way, but in the specific productive friction of two instruments tuned to different frequencies being asked to play in the same key.

 The film was released in 1951. Vivien Lee won the Academy Award for best actress, her second. And she later said in an interview with the specific measured quality of someone choosing words carefully, that the role of Blanch Dubois had taken something from her that she could not name and could not get back. She did not say it damaged her.

She did not say she regretted it. She said it took something. and the taking, the specific documented experience of a woman already managing a serious mental illness choosing to inhabit the most famous portrait of mental collapse in American theater at the highest possible level for the duration of a major film production is something that the mythology of Vivian Lee’s career has acknowledged as a fact without examining as an event. This is the event.

 A woman looked at a role that was the inside of her own experience and said, “I am the only person who can do this.” She was right. And it cost her something she named but could not describe is greater than. After Olivier left, after the divorce was finalized and he had married Joan Plowight and the life that Viven had organized around him for 20 years had been reorganized around his absence, she kept working.

 She kept going to the theater. She kept performing Shakespeare and Czechov and new plays and the occasional film. She kept refusing to stop and the tuberculosis that she had known about since 1945 kept advancing regardless of what she refused to do about it. What the last 7 years of Vivian Lay’s life actually looked like and the specific documented detail of what she was still reaching for in the final months is coming after Olivia.

 The years after Olivier left were not the years the mythology predicts. The mythology of the abandoned woman, the great love gone, the famous marriage dissolved, the iconic beauty diminished by illness and grief, and the specific cruelty of a man who had found someone younger and healthier and less consuming requires those years to be a decline.

They were not a decline. They were in the specific documented way of Viven Lee’s relationship with her own life. [music] A continuation. Jack Maraveail, an actor of quiet distinction and genuine warmth, whose connection to Viven developed in the years after Olivier’s departure, became her companion.

 He has been described by everyone who knew him during this period as someone who loved Viven without the specific exhausted quality that Olivier’s love had acquired over 20 years. Not because Mary was a better man than Olivier, but because he came to her without the specific history that Olivier carried, without the accumulated weight of the episodes and the ect and the cycle of management that had made Olivier’s love by the end look more like duty than desire. Meaveail stayed.

 He stayed through the episodes and through the tuberculosis and through the years when the illness was more visible and the health was less so. He stayed in the way that people who have genuinely chosen a person rather than a version of a person managed to stay. Viven kept working. She played Paula in Duel of Angels in London and New York.

 She played Viola in 12th Night. She played Margarite Goautier in The Lady of the Chameleas. She took the Old Vic Company on a tour of Australia and New Zealand and South America. She was not the most famous actress in the world anymore. She was something more interesting. A serious theatrical artist in the second half of a career, choosing her material with the specific discriminating intelligence of someone who no longer needed to prove anything and was therefore free to pursue exactly what she wanted. She made her final film in

1965, Ship of Fools, directed by Stanley Kramer, starring alongside Oscar Wernern and Lee Marvin and Simone Signor. Vivien played Mary Treadwell, a middle-aged American divorce on an oceanliner, performing the elegance of a woman who has everything managed while everything is coming apart.

 The parallel was not lost on anyone. She knew. She always knew which roles mirrored what she was living. The tuberculosis was advancing. Her doctors were not ambiguous about this. The disease that had been diagnosed in 1945, that had operated as background condition through the decades of her career, advancing, retreating, never fully resolved, was now moving with a clarity that the optimistic framing she had applied to it for 20 years, no longer adequately covered.

 She had been told to rest. She had been told multiple times by multiple physicians in terms that did not allow for misunderstanding that continuing to work at the pace she was working was accelerating what was already happening. She continued because here is what the accounts of Vivian Lei in the final years of her life consistently document.

She was not in denial about what was happening. She was making a choice. The choice was I would rather do this this specific thing that I do this work this performance this being on a stage or in front of a camera and doing the thing that I have spent my entire life learning how to do for as long as it is available to me then extend the time that is available by doing less of it.

It is not a choice everyone would make. It is a choice that requires a very specific, very clear understanding of what your life is for. Vivian Lee understood what her life was for, and she chose it right up until the night of the 7th of July, 1967, when she got out of bed and fell on the floor of her flat in Eaton Square, Belgravia, and Jack Maraveail found her in the morning. She was 53 years old.

Lawrence Olivier was told. He wept. He had been married to Joan Plowright for 6 years is greater than. There is one more thing about Vivian Lee’s story that has never been examined. Honestly, the specific documented relationship between her illness, the ECT that was used to treat it, and what it took from her that nobody has ever properly accounted for, what the treatment did, what the memory loss meant for a woman whose instrument was her memory, and the impossible specific irony of what Vivian Lee was required to survive in order to keep

performing. That is coming. And it is the most honest thing this video can say about what her life actually cost, what the treatment took. The medical practice of the 1950s and 1960s did not have what we have now. It did not have the mood stabilizers, lithium, valproate, the class of medications that from the 1970s onward transformed the management of bipolar disorder from crisis intervention to ongoing maintenance.

 It did not have the therapeutic frameworks, cognitive, behavioral, dialectical, the specific accumulated knowledge of decades of research into how the cycling between manic and depressive episodes can be managed without destroying the person in the process. It had ECT. Electrocomvulsive therapy in which electrical current is passed through the brain under general anesthesia producing a controlled seizure was in the 1950s and 1960s one of the primary interventions available for severe bipolar disorder and severe depression.

Its effectiveness in interrupting the acute phase of a severe episode was real. The evidence for that effectiveness was within the medical understanding of the era genuine. What was less understood? What was not in the 1950s adequately weighed against the benefit was the cost. The cost was memory. Not all of it. Not immediately.

Not in the catastrophic complete way of a neurological event that takes everything at once. But in the cumulative specific way of a procedure applied repeatedly over years. Each application taking something, sometimes a lot, sometimes a fragment, sometimes something the person cannot even identify, has gone until they reach for it and find the reaching produces nothing.

 For Vivien Lee, whose instrument as an actress was her memory, whose technical approach to a role was built on the specific accumulated detail of choices made in rehearsal and preserved and refined and deployed in performance. The ect was taking the thing that made her who she was, not her talent, not the physical instrument, not the voice or the face or the technical capability that audiences experienced when they watched her.

 the interior thing, the specific personal texture of her own past as she had experienced it, the memories of performances, the memories of conversations, the memories, and this is the detail that the accounts of her friends returned to most often of moments with Olivier that she would reach for afterward and find diminished or gone.

 The illness took things from her. The treatment took different things. And Vivian Lee lived inside the impossible mathematics of that knowing that the treatment was necessary to interrupt the episodes that made her unreachable. And knowing that the treatment was taking with each application, pieces of the interior life that the episodes, in their most difficult moments, were the only ones producing.

 The manic episodes which Olivier documented with honest discomfort in his autobiography, which the people around her described with a mixture of alarm and something harder to name, were also the periods of extraordinary creative energy. The periods when she was, by the accounts of people who worked with her during them, the most fully alive version of herself, the most connected to whatever it was she drew on when she performed.

 The illness and the gift were not separable. This is the honest, documented, consistently reported truth about Vivian Lee’s relationship with her mental health. The thing that was destroying her was also producing her, and the treatment that was managing the destruction was also in its cumulative specific memory way, diminishing what was being produced.

 She kept working through all of it. She chose in the full knowledge of what the illness was doing and what the ECT was taking and what the tuberculosis was advancing toward to keep working. Not because she was in denial, not because she didn’t understand, but because the work, the specific, demanding, memory requiring, technically rigorous work of standing in front of an audience and being a character who is not you, but who is built from everything that is most specifically you was the thing worth doing. even at the cost of the things

that were being taken. Even at 53 years old on the floor of a flat in Belgravia, even found in the morning by the man who had stayed. Let me tell you what this video has been doing since the first frame. It has been trying to do something that the mythology of Gone with the Wind, which is very beautiful and very successful and has been doing its work for 85 years, does not have room for.

 It has been trying to put Vivian Lay at the center of Vivian Lay’s story. Not Scarlett O’Hara, not Laurier, not the illness, not the ECT, not the tuberculosis, not the divorce, not the 3 and 1/2 months between the dissolution of a 20-year marriage and the beginning of the next one. Vivien Lee, the person who made all the choices, who chose Olivier at the cost of her first marriage and the daily presence in her daughter’s life.

 Who chose Scarlett O’Hara and made her immortal and then spent 20 years trying to be recognized as something other than Scarlett O’Hara? Who chose Blanch Dubois chose with full awareness of what she was doing to inhabit the most famous portrait of a mind fracturing in American drama because she was the only person qualified to take that journey and she knew it.

 who chose to keep working against medical advice, against the advancing tuberculosis, against the accumulated taking of the ECT, against the specific physical evidence of a body that was running out of the time she was insisting on using, who died at 53 on the floor of her flat found in the morning by someone who had stayed when staying was genuinely difficult.

 She was the most famous actress in the world at 25. She was the owner of two Academy Awards, one for Scarlet, one for Blanch at 37. She was a woman with bipolar disorder in an era that treated bipolar disorder with electricity and took her memory as the price. She was a woman with tuberculosis who chose performance over rest because she understood what her life was for and was not going to spend what remained of it performing her own decline.

 She was the woman who begged Lawrence Olivier not to leave and watched him marry someone else 3 and 1/2 months after he did. She was found in the morning. She was 53. And here is the question that Vivian Lee’s life in all its specific documented extraordinary costly detail asks of everyone who encounters it.

 When the world gives you a role that the world considers your greatest achievement and you know that the role is also your prison, do you perform it anyway? When the thing that is destroying you is also producing you, do you manage the destruction or do you let the production continue? When the person you built your life around leaves and 3 and 1/2 months is its own kind of answer.

 Do you stop? Vivian Lee’s answer to all of those questions was the same. She kept going. She did it her way. She did it brilliantly. She died at 53 on the floor of a flat in Belgravia and was found in the morning. And 85 years after Scarlett O’Hara said, “Frankly, my dear, the world still cannot watch those first frames of Gone with the Wind without expecting something that only one person ever delivered.

 That person was not Scarlett O’Hara. That person was Vivien Lee. I want to ask you one question before you go.” Vivien Lee won two Academy Awards. She was the most famous actress in the world. She had tuberculosis for 22 years and kept it private. She had bipolar disorder in an era that treated it with electricity. She lost portions of her memory to the treatment.

 She lost the man she had built her life around, and she kept working. Does the world owe her a different story than the one it told? Leave your answer below. I read every single comment. If this video showed you something about a woman you thought you already knew, please share it because the mythology remembers Scarlett O’Hara. This video was about Vivian Lee.

 This is Mary of Shadows. Thank you for being here.