Recently seeing A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time in years, I was bowled over by this breathtakingly beautiful woman who was also putting on such a wonderful performance as an actress. Where did she come up with the combination of lostness, spunk, deep hurt and pathos that she poured out into Brando's and Kim Hunter's dysfunctional hovel, while also wreaking such havoc on poor Karl Malden as her hypnotized accidental suitor? How could she inject such a depth of hard-won passion and tragic loss into a movie role? This was no typical melodramatic performance. Was it perhaps her whole life that had prepared her for it?

After choosing and ordering one from over a dozen available Vivien Leigh biographies, I set about trying to find an answer.

Vivien Hartley came from a respectable family without huge amounts of money or status. Educated in a nunnery, followed by finishing school, she was prepared to join the elite by virtue of early competency in theatricals augmented by amazing good looks. From a very early age, nearly everyone who encountered her considered her the most beautiful girl/woman they'd ever seen. She could soon get any man to fall over himself for her or fall in love with her. She thrived on attention and loved having great times among society, the higher and more in the crowd the better.

She married young, too young at nineteen, to a kind gentleman named Herbert Leigh Holman, and soon found herself pregnant. Her acting career was getting going, though, and when she gave birth to a daughter named Suzanne, whom she soon handed over to her mother Gertrude to raise as her granddaughter.

Propelled by talent, but even more by looks, her career soon took off. Now Vivien Leigh, she attracted Laurence Olivier's attention and both became instantly and totally smitten with each other. At the same time, word of her reached Hollywood, she was added to a shortlist of Scarlett O'Haras for Gone With The Wind, one of the most eagerly anticipated movies ever. A screen test identified her as the perfect Scarlett. She was off and running.

But she had health problems. A bout of tuberculosis weakened her stamina. Her affair with Olivier added terrible stresses to her public life. Her husband would not consider divorce. She had trouble saying no to hordes of friends and admirers. Between acting, partying, fretting about Olivier and trying to have some kind of a domestic life with him, she constantly courted exhaustion. Bipolar symptoms emerged that made her life impossible to manage well.

Gone With the Wind was a total triumph. Vivien won the Academy Award. Her life only got more frenetic from there. Finally she and Olivier both got divorces and were able to marry. As the perfect couple, they occupied the spotlight as never before. It all got progressively more unreal. Vivien suffered a breakdown. Olivier described them both as walking corpses.

Now the plot thickens a little. In 1949, Vivien signed up to play Blanche Dubois in the West End, London, production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which like the later film co-starred Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter. Vivien's was to be a demanding role, including a rape scene. The production was a huge hit and ran for 339 performances. It was a grueling run, following which she was almost immediately involved in production for the film version. She clearly needed to slow down, but didn't, or couldn't.

Mr. Vickers, author of this biography that I read, speculates that the length and intensity of the theatrical role of Blanche effected a change within Vivien, causing her to identify with a lost, mentally ill version of herself. He cites authorities to the effect that actors playing roles involving mental illness run risks of internalizing and actually developing features and aspects, if not full blown instances of the illnesses they play. It's an interesting theory, and one that for me seems to chime with the Vivien of Streetcar vs. that of Gone With the Wind twelve years earlier. It's possible that she arrived at her depth of performance in the movie of Streetcar by a process of becoming infected by Blanche the character's mental illness during the long theatrical run.

Nor did the transformation, if that's what it was, end after Streetcar. The remaining sixteen years of her life were plagued by manias and deep depressions. She strayed into Hollywood affairs. Her marriage to Olivier fell apart. She alienated her friends. Finally, she re-contracted TB and died at fifty-three. Her mental illness progressed, perhaps matching or even exceeding Blanche's. But until her dying day Vivien never lost the extraordinary beauty that had been her blessing, but also -- because she never reached her longed-for highest heights as an actor, alongside Olivier -- a kind of curse. ( )