Vivien Leigh was a British stage and film actress. She won two Academy Awards for her work in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She had bipolar disorder, as well as recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis. She died of lung cancer in London, aged 53, on December 17, 2011.
About Vivien Leigh in brief
Vivien Leigh was a British stage and film actress. She won two Academy Awards for her work in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema. She had bipolar disorder, as well as recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s and ultimately killed her at the age of 53. She was the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances. Her mother, a devout Roman Catholic, was born in Darjeeling in 1888 and may have been of Irish and Armenian or Indian ancestry. Leigh and Olivier starred together in many stage productions, with Olivier often directing, and in three films. During her 30-year career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet, and Lady Macbeth. Later in life, she performed as a character actress in a few films. She died of lung cancer in London, aged 53, on December 17, 2011. She is buried in Kensington, London, with her husband Laurence Olivier, who was her spouse from 1940 to 1960, and her daughter, Suzanne, who she had with her first husband, Herbert Leigh Holman, until her death in 2011. Her funeral was held at St Paul’s Cathedral in London on December 18, 2011, where she was buried with her second husband and their daughter, Robin Farrington Farrington, who died in 2012.
She also had a son, Michael, who is now the director of the London Film Festival, and a daughter, Emma, who lives in New York. Her husband was the director and producer of the British film version of Tovarich, which won a Tony Award for best musical. Leigh died of cancer on December 19, 2012, at age 53, and was buried in London with her daughter and son-in-law, Michael FarringtonFarrington, and their son, Christopher Farrington. Her daughter is now a film director, producer, and director of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a biopic about the life of Vivian Leigh, which is due to be released in 2015. Her son is also a film producer, having worked on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films, including The Hobbit, The Godfather, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Battle of the Holy Grail. Leigh is survived by her husband, two daughters, a son and a stepdaughter. Her last husband, Laurence, died in 2011, aged 89, after a long battle with lung cancer, which he had battled for years. She has a daughter with her third husband, the actor and director David Naughton, and one stepdaughter, the actress and director Julianne Moore.
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