Leigh, Vivien (1913-1967), stage and screen actress, associated with two Academy Award-winning performances, that of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Leigh, born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjiling, India, was relatively untrained when she made her first screen appearance, as a schoolgirl in a slight comedy Things are Looking Up (1934), directed by Albert de Courville, but the following year, while appearing on the London stage, she was spotted and put under contract by the film producer Alexander Korda. Her off-screen romance and marriage to Laurence Olivier not only kept her on the front pages, but offered her opportunities to act opposite him, the twist being that she was frequently personally identified with the parts she played.

In her early films for Korda, such as Fire Over England (1937), 21 Days (1937), and St Martin's Lane (1938), Leigh's kittenish appeal and porcelain attractiveness supplant her talent. In Gone With the Wind, however, a part she won against enormous competition, her fragile remoteness becomes a strength. It seems that Victor Saville, her director on Storm in a Teacup (1937), recognized the delicate, but dangerous, qualities that were previously only latent in her acting and suggested she offer herself as Scarlett. Gone With the Wind made her one of the world's top stars.

As a consequence, her natural sense of comic style and timing, known to British audiences in revivals of George Bernard Shaw, Richard Sheridan, and Thornton Wilder, were rarely seen on the screen. She was miscast in many of the films that followed and relatively artless in Waterloo Bridge (1940), That Hamilton Woman/Lady Hamilton (1941), and Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). Her fierce, unstable quality was not recaptured until she repeated her stage success as Blanche DuBois in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, starring opposite Marlon Brando, to give the finest performance of her film career. She sustained the same nervous, neurotic energy in two lesser films, versions of The Deep Blue Sea (1955, directed by Anatole Litvak), by Terence Rattigan, and Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961, directed by José Quintero), in both of which she repeated the fearful combination of coy flirtatiousness and jealous fury, qualities that had distinguished her Scarlett and her Blanche, and confirmed that she was an instinctive, rather than an academic actress.