Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon ed. by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale (review)

In an interview in 1960, seven years before her untimely death, the still vibrant Vivien Leigh remarked: “I am not a film star. I’m an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and publicity” (p. 94). Yet, as Kate Dorney and Maggie B. Gale demonstrate in their ground-breaking collection of essays Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon, based on the Vivien Leigh archive recently donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Leigh’s legacy has always been driven by myths about her life and career. Narratives about her high profile marriage to the legendary actor Laurence Olivier, her debilitating illnesses and breakdowns (she suffered from bipolar disorder and tuberculosis), her dazzling beauty, as well as her position as an ambitious, vivacious professional woman in a world of fast drinking and overbearing men, have overshadowed the breadth of Leigh’s talent and artistry. By providing context and background for understanding Leigh’s mediated and mythologized history and then critically assessing how those stories came to be understood and disseminated, this volume offers an excellent model for re-thinking how we might push past ways of looking at actresses that privilege uncomplicated ideas about women, performance, and celebrity.

Leigh did not write an autobiography nor did she authorize a biographer during her lifetime, but fortunately, Leigh’s archive is full of written materials: “letters, scripts, . . . personal documents, bills, speeches, appointment diaries, lists of luggage, contents for tours and even lists of domestic items for repair” (p. 3). These documents provide the most intimate and immediate access we have to Leigh’s voice. Dorney and Gale suggest that the material in the archive reflects Leigh’s active performance of self-presentation/preservation:

The construction of her auto/biographic narrative thus far has been created without interventions from Leigh herself: although of course one might argue that in keeping so many of her private and professional papers she was effectively “self-archiving.”

(p. 11)

The archive reveals a different Leigh from the hysterical, fragile beauty mythologized by the media. Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon thus responds to the central paradoxes that plague Leigh’s legacy:

She can’t just be a fabulous stage and screen actress, a box-office draw and have an extraordinary ability to play a range of challenging roles over a career spanning more than thirty years. Instead she has to be “mad” in performance because she is “mad” in life, a tragic beauty plagued by a fatal flaw—either ambition or her illness.

(p. 9)

Currently there are no books that “assess the different aspects of Leigh’s life and career from a critical perspective” (p. 9). Although Leigh had a good deal of “ascribed celebrity” (because of her beauty and her association with Olivier), her “achieved celebrity” was always in question (p. 9). This collection commemorates Leigh’s superior talent, intelligence, ambition, kindness, awareness of her own aesthetic practice, her meticulousness (she kept an extremely organized household and actively curated her surroundings), her style, and perhaps above all, her compassion and humanity (she was very kind to her many fans).

The book is divided into three sections. Part one, “Re-reading Vivien Leigh,” provides essential framing for the chapters that follow with an excellent introduction and essays by each editor. Dorney explains that Leigh’s life coincided with

an extraordinary period of change in social mores and practice . . . . Born in India in 1913; educated at a convent school in Roehampton; sent to finishing school in France and Germany; trained at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art (RADA); an international star from the age of 26 until her death thirty years later; married and divorced twice—Leigh was witness to these changes.

(p. 27)

Dorney’s essay carefully sketches out the dynamics of Leigh’s public legacy and what has been consistently left out of Leigh’s story: her acute awareness of the constant negotiation of her celebrity...