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Sunday, February 18, 2024

Vivien Leigh - by Tennessee Williams as recalled by Sir Alec Guiness

 


"She seemed to have been carved either from the moon or from some rare or discontinued batch of Dresden.She fell apart very early and very quickly. I never saw cruelty or coldness in Vivien. She appeared, at a very young age, to turn into a lovely stalk of chalk, and the chipping away had begun, and you were there to see the flaking off. So many of us, I can attest, tried to do what we could, but there was - and is - nothing really to do. The destiny that gave her that magic that surrounded her came, I hate to think, with some exorbitant debts, and those debts were collected early and bluntly and swiftly.”

'I love what Tennessee said about Vivien, and I agree with him.
Let’s be gentle.'

– Alec Guinness, 1991




Plagued by delicate mental health seemingly all her life, she was chronically depressive and suffered what we now would call bi-polar but also recurrent bouts of TB saw her early death at a mere 53

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