Vivien Leigh skyrocketed to fame as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind” – but just a few years later, she found herself in a mental institution.
The two-time Oscar winner’s tumultuous life is the subject of a new book by Lyndsy Spence, “Where Madness Lies.” It details Leigh’s struggles with mental illness, which resulted in a breakdown, as well as her turbulent marriage to actor Laurence Olivier.
Leigh passed away in 1967 at age 53 from tuberculosis.
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Spence told Fox News Digital that the late star’s extensive archives, as well as letters and audio recordings from those who knew Leigh, detailed how she “fell into darkness.”
“There are other books where they simply say she did movies, and then she went crazy, or she was very promiscuous, or she was beating people up behind the scenes,” Spence explained. “I wanted to tap into her story as somebody who was mentally ill and the Draconian treatments she endured.”
Leigh was filming 1954’s “Elephant Walk” in Sri Lanka when she frequently began sending Olivier “erratic” postcards, Spence claimed. The couple married in 1940.
“They didn’t realize it at the time . . . when this darkness or mania took over,” said Spence. “Her handwriting changed, and she would scribble all of these erratic postcards and letters. . . . She was desperate for Lawrence Olivier to join her.”
“She would write him things like, ‘Bring me my evening dresses,’” said Spence. “Just trivial things. But he wasn’t [at their home] in England. He was in Italy with his mistress, so he wasn’t getting her postcards. And because he wasn’t responding, I think it made everything 10 times worse, because she felt neglected and alone.”
The marriage, plagued by Olivier’s infidelity and Leigh’s struggles with bipolar disorder, was already deteriorating when she became infatuated with Peter Finch, her co-star and husband’s protégé. According to the book, she would often confuse Finch with her husband, calling him “Larry” and pleading with him to sleep with her. He “consented to her wishes.”
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“I think Peter Finch was equally broken as Vivien,” said Spence. “He was a very hard drinker and a womanizer. He said he believed in Buddhism, but his lifestyle certainly didn’t portray that. He had this great complex that he was never good enough. . . . When he and Vivien were on ‘Elephant Walk,’ they were on the same wavelength. But I think Vivien’s intensity scared Peter Finch. That’s what pushed him away.”
Meanwhile, Leigh was taunted by her demons.
“She’s going through something where her brain just can’t kick into gear,” said Spence. “She can’t go over her lines. She’s confrontational. She’s drinking a lot and hallucinating. People just thought she was nuts and she was a drunk. But she was going through a mental breakdown. Her bipolar illness was starting to reveal itself.”
According to the book, things worsened when the film production moved to Hollywood. On the flight back to Los Angeles, Leigh suffered a “spectacular breakdown,” said Spence.
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“She tried to escape,” Spence shared. “She tried to rip her clothes off. She thought the plane was on fire. She had to be sedated. And when she got to Hollywood, she just couldn’t perform the way they wanted her to in front of the camera. She thought she was in [1951’s] ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ and she was saying all kinds of mad things.”
Leigh was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor. But her troubles didn’t end there.
“She was discarded to a Hollywood bungalow on her own with an old boyfriend, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic,” said Spence. “So, you have these two people feeding off each other and, more or less, all hell broke loose. Olivier . . . brought her back to England, and he committed her there.”
Olivier dropped Leigh off at Netherne Asylum. There, she was fed by tubes, induced into a coma, given daily ice baths and “mummified in damp sheets to keep her nervous system sedated,” the book reveals. She also received shocks of electroconvulsive therapy.
Each day was like the next.
Leigh would demand the nurses to call Olivier so he could take her home. But the book notes, “There was no address for Larry.”
Meanwhile, Olivier “wrestled with his guilt.” But he had reached a breaking point.
When Olivier wondered when his wife had “first gone mad,” he thought of 1937 when they were performing “Hamlet.” At the time, the pair, both married to other spouses, embarked on an affair. The production was tense, as many felt that Leigh was a “weak actress” in comparison to her leading man.
“He remembered that something triggered her in the dressing room,” said Spence. “She started screaming and hitting him. He described it as ‘demonic.’ . . . He was frightened by that. But he didn’t see much of that until the 1950s. And I think it did affect him greatly.
“The woman he had married was no longer. When she awoke from her treatment, and he finally came home to get her from Italy, he said, ‘She was no longer the girl I had fallen in love with. In fact, I loved her that much less.’”
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“I think he tried to get to know this new person,” Spence continued. “But obviously, if somebody’s so unpredictable, most of the time they’re medicated and they’re volatile. . . . She would beat him up at the drop of a hat and scream at him in public.
“I think it’s hard for the person who’s suffering, but I think it’s equally difficult for the onlooker who’s trying to navigate this storm. And because so much was unknown back then, he didn’t even have support. . . . I can understand why he started to pull away from her.”
According to Spence, Leigh’s manic episodes started early in life.
“I think [her struggles with mental health] were there even as a child and a young girl,” said Spence. “She has a short attention span, she’s very impulsive and she’s quite naughty. A lot of people thought that was behavior problems or attention-seeking.”
“I think her mental health struggles came to the forefront after she had her child, Suzanne,” said Spence about Leigh’s daughter with her first husband, Herbert Leigh Holman. That union lasted from 1932 to 1940.
“In her diary . . . she writes about her child in such a detached way,” Spence continued. “Even the childbirth, which was very traumatic, she just says, ‘Had a baby. A girl.’ And that’s it. She would devote more time to writing about going to the hairdresser. I think she was having postpartum depression.
“She was 19 when her child was born. I think she was struggling a lot. But that got swept under the rug. . . . She just didn’t know how to bond with her child. It was the simmering point of her struggles.”
Leigh’s symptoms persisted even after she got treatment. Spence’s book described how Leigh would be found picking imaginary dirt off the carpet, smashing windows and wandering around naked. During the marriage, Leigh suffered miscarriages, which she believed contributed to her “mental instability.”
Before her treatment, Leigh was known to throw money out of windows, Spence claimed.
The couple finally called it quits in 1960. Spence said that Leigh spent her final years “on a search to try and make sense of her past.”
“Most people thought her tuberculosis was the flu, and she would get better,” said Spence. “But she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t. It’s quite ironic that having all of these demons with her mental health, it’s her physical body that… gets her in the end.”
“People said there was a peacefulness seen in Vivien that didn’t exist in the past,” said Spence. “She started to read a lot of religious texts and philosophies. . . . Although her death was tragic, because she was so young, she had peace in the end. I think there’s some comfort there that she was prepared for. . . . She accepted what was going to happen.”
While Leigh was on her deathbed, Olivier was receiving treatment for cancer. And when he learned of her death, the star was “pretty cut up,” said Spence.
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“They had a passionate, complex relationship,” said Spence. “She left her mark on him. He had remarried and had children. . . . But he mourned her. He carried Vivien with him [in his heart] until his death. He would often reminisce about Vivien and say, ‘That was love. That was the real thing.’”
Today, Spence hopes her book will encourage others to speak candidly about mental health.
“Times have changed, and you can get support for yourself and other people,” she said. “And everything’s not linear. You can be mentally ill, have your struggles and relapse in certain behaviors, but you’re still worthy of love.”
