Vivien Leigh Was Replaced By Elizabeth Taylor, Then Committed To A Psychiatric Hospital

In February 1953 Vivien Leigh, who had won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire, began filming Elephant Walk for Paramount on location in Ceylon. According to Turner Classic Movies, her wildly shifting moods had already led the director, William Dieterle, to shoot her scenes twice, including versions in which she stood far enough in the background that the shot could still be used if she was replaced, and to frame some shots with her back to the camera for the same reason. After about three weeks she was flown back to Hollywood, sedated on the flight, and by TCM's account it was already clear that she would have to be replaced. On March 20, 1953, The New York Times ran the headline: Miss Taylor Takes Vivien Leigh Role. Paramount borrowed Elizabeth Taylor, 21, from MGM, which by TCM's account charged $150,000 for the loan. The dialogue and the close-ups were reshot with Taylor, but the long shots filmed in Ceylon were kept, as the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka and the Daily Mail report, and according to Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, Leigh can still be seen in some of them. Taylor later told her biographer Donald Spoto that Vivien Leigh had been her heroine. Laurence Olivier brought her home to England. In a letter to his first wife, Jill Esmond, quoted by Leigh's biographer Kendra Bean, he called getting her home an incredible nightmare and wrote that she was now safe in what he believed were the best hands in England. By Kendra Bean's account, Olivier had her committed to Netherne, a psychiatric hospital at Coulsdon in Surrey, where she spent about three months and was given several doses of electroconvulsive therapy, which Bean describes as the only treatment for psychosis at the time. No hospital records are public, and Leigh left no account of those months. Today her illness would be called bipolar disorder; Olivier's word for it, in his autobiography Confessions of an Actor (1982), was manic depression. On November 5, 1953, her fortieth birthday, she opened in the West End in The Sleeping Prince at the Phoenix Theatre, directed by Olivier; it ran 274 performances. They divorced in 1960. She won a Tony Award in 1963 for Tovarich and made her last film, Ship of Fools, in 1965. On the night of July 7 to 8, 1967, John Merivale, who had lived with her since 1960, found her on the floor of the flat in Eaton Square, London. She was 53. The reference record attributes her death to tuberculosis; the dispatches that weekend gave no official cause, and the theatres of the West End put out their lights for an hour. Sourced from Turner Classic Movies, The New York Times (March 20, 1953), Kendra Bean (vivandlarry.com), Laurence Olivier's Confessions of an Actor (1982), The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka (with Michelangelo Capua's 2003 biography and Bevis Bawa's recollections), the Daily Mail, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, the Los Angeles Times (1967), The Sydney Morning Herald (2015), the Victoria and Albert Museum's Vivien Leigh Archive, vivienleighlegend.com and reference entries; with tape of the 12th and 24th Academy Awards (1940, 1952), the Gone with the Wind colour tests (1939), British Pathe (1946), an AP Royal Film Performance reel (1948), Warner Pathe News (1952), the A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Elephant Walk (1954) trailers, the surviving Ceylon location footage in Elephant Walk, ITN (London Airport and the 1957 St James's Theatre march), Small World (CBS, 1958), a 1950s tribute film to Alexander Korda, ABC Television Australia (1961), Great Acting (BBC, 1966), 60 Minutes (CBS, 1983) and the V&A. This is a documentary. Every photograph of Vivien Leigh and the people in her life is a real archival or press photograph, and every clip is real archival film or interview tape; their words are their own recorded words or are attributed to the source that reported them. There is no colourisation and there are no AI portraits. 28 place and mood images are generated and are marked ILLUSTRATION on screen. Nothing on screen depicts the hospital or the treatment.