VIVIEN LEIGH and REX HARRISON: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (20)

               

[This is an occasional series describing British artistes who found fame on stage or in the movies]

This piece describes two artistes who became globally recognised for one great film role – Vivien Leigh as an unforgettable Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Rex Harrison as opinionated Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Both were consummate acting performers but both had a dark side. Vivien Leigh’s behaviour was highly erratic due to her affliction by the mental illness now known as bi-polar disorder. Rex Harrison was a rudely egotistical philanderer cordially loathed by his profession.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara

Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) was born Vivian Hartley in Darjeeling, British India, where her father was an Indian Army cavalry officer. She was educated at British convent schools and travelled in Europe becoming fluent in French and Italian. Attracted to acting, she attended RADA fitfully, becoming friends with the future star Maureen O’Sullivan. Already a beauty, she attracted the attention of barrister Herbert Leigh Holman and they married in 1932 when Vivien was 18 and they soon had her daughter Suzanne. 

Vivien, adopting the name of Vivien Leigh, appeared in the West End in the well-reviewed play The Mask of Virtue with O’Sullivan but when the play moved to a larger theatre its run ended when she was unable to project her voice sufficiently far. She met Laurence Olivier and they became lovers in 1937, making the Spanish Armada drama film Fire over England. Vivien played classic roles including Ophelia to Olivier’s Hamlet in an Old Vic season in 1938. The first symptoms of her unstable mood-changes appeared during this season when she collapsed in a violent passion and had no later memory of the episode.

Vivien, who had signed a Korda contract, and Olivier went to the US in 1939 where he made Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. Vivien appeared in the movie A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor and Maureen O’Sullivan. Achieving a long held ambition, Vivien landed the plum part of Scarlett O’Hara for the David Selznick production of Gone with the Wind, impressing the director George Cukor (though he was replaced by the less friendly Victor Fleming). The film was a huge success and Vivien was never better as the wilful, flirtatious, maddening yet lovely heroine O’Hara.

Vivien Leigh with Clark Gable as Rhett Butler

After her triumph as Scarlett O’Hara she got her divorce from always-supportive Herbert Holman, married Olivier in 1940 and picked up the Best Actress Oscar but her career rather trod water. She was well-liked in the drama Waterloo Bridge but their Broadway Romeo and Juliet, in which they had sunk $40,000, flopped disastrously. They played Nelson and Lady Hamilton in the propagandist That Hamilton Woman in 1941, glamorising “brave Britain” while the US remained out of the War. Vivien and Olivier became the most talked about couple on the planet, precursors of Burton and Taylor. Both Vivien and Olivier went on tour entertaining the forces but Vivien fell ill and in 1944 tuberculosis was diagnosed, from which she temporarily recovered. A miscarriage followed, sending her into a long and deep depression.

Olivier was knighted in 1947, making Vivien Lady Olivier, a title she much cherished. Soon after, they went together on a tour of Australasia performing Shakespeare, Shaw and Sheridan. The couple quarrelled constantly and they came home exhausted. Olivier later said the tour marked the beginning of the end of their relationship.

As Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar named Desire

Vivien had a final great success in Tennessee Williams’ drama A Streetcar named Desire on the London stage, followed by the 1951 film version playing opposite a young Marlon Brando. She won her second Best Actress Oscar for this role, but she claimed “the role tipped me over into madness.”

The 1950s were unhappy for Vivien. Outspoken critic Kenneth Tynan mocked Vivien’s “shopgirl voice” when she played both Shaw’s and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra on Broadway in 1951 with Olivier and delivered the same raspberry for Vivien’s Lady Macbeth, woundingly opining that her mediocre acting talents were holding Olivier back. Tynan much later recanted this criticism but anyway Vivien was deeply mortified and collapsed into depression and self-loathing.

Making a film on location in Ceylon in 1953, Vivien embarked upon an affair with handsome Peter Finch which spluttered along for some years and then she took up with the actor Jack Merivale. Laurence Olivier had ample reason to seek to put an end to his life with Vivien. He tried to help her but medical understanding of bi-polarity was in its infancy. The intrusive treatment of electric convulsion therapy was then widely used (much more sensitively now) but Vivien was an unresponsive patient. Actor David Niven said she was “mad, quite mad” at this time and her manic symptoms presented themselves as nymphomania. She would bed house-guests, proposition taxi-drivers and delivery boys and fornicate with complete strangers in public parks. Olivier could take no more and they divorced in 1960. She soon married Jack Merivale, who knew of her illness and helped her.

Vivien made a number of later films of which The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone was perhaps the most memorable, a tale of an ageing American actress in love with a gigolo, maybe rather too close to reality for comfort.

Vivien in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961)

 Vivien deteriorated further, now drinking too much: she had a severe recurrence of TB and died suddenly in her Eaton Square flat in 1967, aged 53. This was a sad end for a highly talented actress who had made Scarlett O’Hara an immortal and who had brought energy and beauty to the British and American theatre.

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Rex Harrison (1908-90) was born in Huyton, Liverpool. He claimed his father was a cotton broker and the family had rolling acres and that he pushed his grandmother around in a bath-chair. Later research found no rolling acres, grandmother nor bath-chair and many think his father was actually a local butcher. His origins were obscure but there was enough money somewhere to send him to the public school Liverpool College: Harrison was much given to invention and play-acting.

Rex Harrison

Harrison was stage-struck and spent long hours at the Liverpool Alhambra watching and copying the techniques of the great actors of the day like Sir Frank Benson and Gerald du Maurier. He became a professional actor in 1924, though never going to drama school, and had a long and obscure apprenticeship appearing in touring plays and with small parts in films. Eventually he made his breakthrough on the London stage in Terence Rattigan’s 1937 comedy French without Tears. This was followed by the AJ Cronin novel film adaptation The Citadel where Harrison played a rich private doctor opposite idealistic Robert Donat. He sparkled in the Carol Reed comedy-thriller Night Train to Munich in 1940 and was particularly good as Salvationist-preacher Adolphus Cusins in Shaw’s Major Barbara – Harrison’s charm in light comedy was becoming apparent. In 1945 at the end of the War, Harrison co-starred in the film of Coward’s Blithe Spirit with unforgettable Margaret Rutherford.

Harrison was now a star and had married in 1943 the elegant German-Jewish actress Lilli Palmer. He was however a serial philanderer. One mistress was the bosomy starlet Carole Landis; when he told Carole in 1947 that he was breaking from her, she swallowed pills to commit suicide. When Harrison found her, he delayed calling an ambulance while trying to find a discreet doctor and Carole died. The US public was outraged and the film studio withdrew from their contract, when Harrison’s behaviour was revealed at the inquest.

Harrison’ screen persona was as a charmer, with a clipped way of speaking and a distinctive rasping voice. While women found him irresistible, he was habitually boorish and overbearing. He was always rude to waiters, usually referred to as “wops”; one waiter was so incensed by his insults that he caught Harrison with a haymaker uppercut and sent him to the floor, gushing blood. His much-suffering wife Lilli said “It was the best day of my life!” He was also a self-proclaimed wine expert. If his host was unwise enough to invite Harrison to choose the wine, he would choose the most expensive on the wine-list, sniff the cork and go through all the palaver before pontificating perhaps that “the grapes are from the wrong side of the vineyard” – acquaintances said that in reality Harrison knew nothing about wine – it was all an act.

Harrison, like every British male, was attracted to lovely Kay Kendall who had made her name in the comedy Genevieve. He discovered that Kay was suffering from incurable leukaemia and her time was short. He and Lilli agreed to divorce and in 1958 he married Kay and looked after her well during her final illness. Observers said it was the one decent thing Harrison ever did. He had promised Lilli that he would remarry her but of course he did no such thing. Instead he married actress Rachel Roberts but their life together was so wretched Rachel committed suicide with an overdose – just like Carole Landis.

Harrison with Kay Kendall

Meanwhile Harrison had amused in The Constant Husband, was villainously smooth in Midnight Lace and imperially well-paid in 1963 as Julius Caesar in Cleopatra. He landed the plum role of Professor Higgins in the London stage musical My Fair Lady based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, playing opposite Julie Andrews. He hated Julie later sneering that the “only time I rooted for the Nazis” was when he saw her in The Sound of Music! The film version of My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn was a huge success and Harrison was excellent, his tweed hat becoming his trademark.

Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins

Harrison had 2 more wives (making a total of 6) and was rich enough to live the grand life. He so aggravated his butler that he was threatened with a shotgun. His manner with his fans was typically rude. Accosted by an old lady at the stage door seeking his autograph, he told her to “sod off” and the furious lady hit him over the head with a rolled-up programme. Stanley Holloway remarked “It’s the first time the fan has hit the shit!”

Harrison worked up to 3 weeks of his death aged 82. He made the unsuccessful musical Dr Doolittle, being aggravating and disruptive on set. He fitted most comfortably into drawing room comedy and I remember seeing his polished performance on Broadway in Lonsdale’s Aren’t we All? in 1985. He was knighted in 1989 but died in New York of pancreatic cancer in 1990. Colleagues wondered where to have his funeral and a wit suggested that a telephone box would be a fine venue, with ample room for all his friends!

Harrison delighted his audience but it was wise not to get too close to this grotesquely politically incorrect “alpha male silverback” – he was rather a nasty old brute.

SMD

1.02.15
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2015