Vivien Leigh
In 1962, Vivien Leigh took home the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, a recognition that underlined the range she'd built across decades working on both stage and screen. It was a career that moved between film and theatre, and that single award captured something of how she'd never confined herself to one medium.
Born on 5 November 1913 in Darjeeling, Leigh was a British citizen who attended Woldingham School, Loreto Convent, and later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. That formal training fed into a professional life spent working as a film actor and stage actor in English-language productions. Her screen work brought her the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, a level of recognition few performers reach even once.
Her work also earned her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, adding an international dimension to a body of honours that already spanned stage and screen. The Tony, the two Oscars, and the Volpi Cup together trace a career that earned recognition across multiple contexts and continents. She also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a further marker of the standing her film work achieved.
Leigh died on 8 July 1967 at her home in Eaton Square. Her two Academy Awards for Best Actress remain a concrete measure of the esteem her film performances commanded during her lifetime.
Quotes by Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh's insights on:
English people don’t have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.
Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That’s why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.
Some critics saw fit to say that I was a great actress. I thought that was a foolish, wicket thing to say because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn’t able to carry.
I cannot let well enough alone. I get restless. I have to be doing different things.
Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one’s place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea – one swims where one wants.
Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It’s much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.
