Vivien Leigh Became Famous Overnight In London Comedy

Press, Volume C, Issue 29706, 27 December 1961, Page 2

Vivien Leigh Became Famous Overnight In London Comedy

[By J. C. TREWIN, tn th« United Kingdom Information Service] The actress who comes to fame overnight used to be, and may be still, familiar in romantic fiction. But she can also appear in life. Vivien Leigh was, and is. such an actress. Before a premiere in May, 1935, she was unknown; next morning she was the theatrical subject of the hour. At the time she was 21. Born in India, and educated in France, Germany, and Italy, she had studied for a time at the Comedie Francaise and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She had acted in films, and in February, 1935, she had surprised by her dark beauty the few critics who went to an experimental theatre at Kew Bridge, in the environs of London. The play, quite unimportant, was “The Green Sash.”

Less than three months later Ashley Dukes adapted from the German an artificial comedy. '‘The Mask of Virtue.” in an eighteenth - century setting. It was staged at the Ambassadors Theatre, in the West End. On the night itself, and in the newspapers next day, the cheering was for a young actress who, according to Dak«. "captivated by a lively blend of innocence and sophistication.” Another critic said that ‘‘Vivien Leigh looked as beautiful as a flower.” . , Her name indeed was made overnight; at once it was asked doubtfully whether she could sustain this sudden honour, or whether she would prove to be a beauty first and an actress second. Versatile Aetress Vivien Leigh went on. defiantly. to show that she depended on more than her classical features and her physical grace. The cinema, of course, would capture her; but before her Hollywood triumph in the Civil War film of "Gone With the Wind” at the end of tne nineteen-thirties, she had established herself as a stage actress with a variety of parts that moved between the demure young Jenny in a version of Max Beerbohm s •The Happy Hypocrite.” Anne Boleyn in * ‘Henry the Eighth” at the Open Air Theatre, and Ophelia with the Old Vic Company (and laurence Olivier as Hamlet) in the Kronberg courtyard at Elsinore in 1937. , In the same year she was an exquisite Titania in Tyrone Guthries famous "Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Old Vic, with Robert Helpmann as Oberon. She made a New York debut in IMO as Juliet to the Romeo of her second husband, Laurence Olivier, in a revival that he directed. Back in London during the middte of the war she appeared as Jennifer Dubedat in a revival of Shaw’s comedy. "The Doctor's Dilemma": a poised and feeling performance of a woman who in the theatre can be dully matter-of-fact. Later, for three months In 1943, she toured in the Middle East, entertaining the troops. It was in May. 1943. that Vivien Leigh reappeared in London. By now she had grown into a singularly versatile artist with a flashing sense of humour to illuminate her comedy, and an innate dignity that served her in more serious work. Her technique had developed with experience. Always it had been trite to say of Vivien Leigh that her face was her fortune. She had a probing intellect, and she never stopped working. In her return to London — the play was Thornton Wilder's ‘The Skin, at our Teeth”—she was the maid who is enchantress eternal: a part she filled with the wittiest invention. James Agate said of her that she was "halt dabchick, half dragon-fly: the beet perform-

ance in this kind since Yvonne Prin temps.” 16 Yean Later Sixteen years have passed since then—years during wtidch she has acted in many parts of the world, and in most things between farce and Lady Macbeth. Though warmly received by the London public, she has not invariably had the critical reception she deserves. In fact, Vivien Leigh has done several remarkable tilings. We can remember her Antigone with the Old Vic in 1949 when a writer said of her in this play of Anouilh that “her beautiful sculptured face had the true quality of the tragic mask.” Later in 1949 she was the pitiful Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire,” not a good play but the cause of a performance —one she would repeat in the film—of nervous intellect allied to stamina. In the 1961 Festival of Britain's season at the St James's she was the two Cleopatras, Shaw's and Shakespeare’s; and during 1955, at Stratford-upon-Avon, she played Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of her then busband, Laurence Olivier. Two years later she toured Europe in the part of Lavinia in Shakespeare's “Titus Andronicus” in the immensely successful Peter Brook production from Stratford-upon-Avon, a tour sponsored by the British Council which was also a triumph for Olivier. The Australian tour of 1958 followed with Olivier and the Old Vic in “The School for Scandal,” “Richard III” and “The Skin of our Teeth,” when she played Lady Teazle, Lady Anne, and Sabina. Since then we need speak only of three such different parts as those in Coward’s light comedy. "South Sea Bubble”; in the Fry version of a Giradoux comedy renamed "Duel of Angels”; and in Coward’s “Look After Lulu!" from the farce by Feydeau. In the first she flickered through a sequence of Cow-

ard's lightest scenes. In the second she had a scorching directness as the play's dark spirit who mocks at courageous purity. In the third she was a preposterous bubble. Range enough there. When we consider also the Viola and Marguerite Gautier she is playing on the Old Vic tour of the Antipodes and the Far East, we know that the girl who reached fame in a night just 26 years ago was never meant to be simply a moth of fortune. In her own right Vivien Leigh is deservedly among the first actresses of the English-speaking stage.