Collaboration, adaptation, and unmade projects

The chapter examines two key roles from different stages of Vivien Leigh’s career that highlight her work as an active collaborator in adapting roles from stage and page to screen. It looks firstly at her work on A Streetcar Named Desire in the early 1950s, considering how she exercised authorial agency in assisting with the adaptation of the script from stage to screen. The chapter then examines how she navigated the interlocking issues of age and gender and their impact on star labor in the 1965 adaptation of Ship of Fools. I consider how materials such as script annotations, paper correspondence, and phone call transcripts speak more broadly to the archive’s potential to deconstruct the film performance by mapping out its prehistory, interrogating this as a process of personal and collaborative development. The chapter also considers the material record of projects documented in Vivien Leigh’s archive that did not come to fruition.