cahn

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier: it's actually a sad story for how it ended. As mentioned, they both married young, then met at the set of "Fire over England" (typical bodice ripper, he's a Sir Walter Raleigh wannabe, she's a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth), fell in love, and eventually left their respective spouses for each other. Hollywood beckoned, Vivien Leigh landed the female role of the decade with Scarlett O'Hara, and Olivier didn't do badly himself with playing Maxim de Winter in Hitchcock's "Rebecca". Having obtained their divorces, they married (to the great relief of the studio bosses), and returned to England, because WWII.

And then various things over the next two decades happened.

1) Vivien Leigh was bi polar, and there was little to no idea of how to handle this back then. Mostly the people around her thought the cycles of giddy heights and deep depression were spoiled star behavior, despite her doctors pointing out it was a genuine mental problem.

2) Olivier was rapidly considered as the best (stage) actor of his generation, but this never quite translated to the movies, including his own Shakespeare films. He's good in several of them, don't get me wrong, but the effect he must have had on a live audience according to evreyone's descriptions just isn't there. Meanwhile, the camera had loved Vivien Leigh. They didn't act together in movies anymore after "That Hamilton Woman", but they acted repeatedly on stage, where the critical lords of the day, especially Kenneth Tynan who was an Olivier fanboy of the first order, trounced her for not being at his level. (This did wonders for her mental condition.) Conversely, if she did act far, far away from him in the movies, like in the film version of "Streetcar named Desire" which she got her second Oscar for, you had director Elia Kazan suspecting Olivier must be secretly coaching her. (Which was rubbish.)

3) She also had miscarriages and got tuberculosis.

4) True fact sounding like a story: Terence Rattigan's screenplay for "The VIPs" - filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard burton - was inspired by something that happened to the Oliviers, with Vivien nearly leaving him for Peter Finch but fog preventing the plane from taking off so Laurence Olivier made it to the airport and could persuade her to stay with him.

6) In the end, though, he left her, for Joan Plowright. (Who'd played his daughter in "The Entertainer".) After a few more years on her own, she died.

7) According to his son Tarquin, in old age Laurence Olivier when watching "That Hamilton Woman" on the telly got tears in his eyes and said "This was real. This was love". (To which Joan Plowright presumably said "Thanks, Larry", I guess. She's a fabulous old woman herself now, as can be seen in the movie "Tea with the Dames" which is streaming on Amazon Prime in my region at last.)