Vivien Leigh – The Tragic Fate of the Woman Scarlett O'Hara Destroyed

She won two Academy Awards. She played the most beloved character in American cinema. She was considered the most beautiful actress in the world. And Scarlett O'Hara destroyed her. The role that made Vivien Leigh immortal was also the role that began her unraveling. The pressure of being Scarlett O'Hara — of being that character forever, in every room she entered, on every stage she stood on — combined with the bipolar disorder nobody had named yet to produce a destruction so complete that Laurence Olivier, the man who loved her more than anyone, described her manic episodes as possession by an uncannily evil monster. She was replaced on a film set in Ceylon by Elizabeth Taylor and sent home on a stretcher. She received electroconvulsive therapy until there were burn marks on her temples from the electrodes. Laurence Olivier divorced her for a younger woman. She was found dead on her bedroom floor on the morning of July 8th, 1967. She was fifty-three years old. On her bedside table was a photograph of Laurence Olivier. He was found twenty years later, crying alone in his house, watching her old films on television. "This was love," he said. "This was the real thing." This is the full story of Vivien Leigh — the love that consumed her, the role that broke her, and the man whose photograph she kept by her bed until the morning she died. ———————————————————————— Silk & Sorrow uncovers the hidden truth behind history's most admired women — Hollywood actresses, royalty, and Gilded Age heiresses whose private lives were nothing like their public ones. New videos every Thursday and Sunday. Subscribe so you never miss a story. ———————————————————————— #VivienLeigh #OldHollywood #GoldenAgeHollywood #HistoricalDocumentary