Documenting other roles
The final chapter of the section focuses on archival traces of off-screen labor, looking at Vivien Leigh’s alternative “roles” between the 1930s and 1960s. These are illuminated via letters, business records, scrapbooks, ephemera, and photographs. Case studies include an exploration of Leigh’s war work in the 1940s; her agency as a producer with V. L. Productions from the 1950s; and her role as a campaign figurehead in the fight against the closure of the St. James’s Theatre later in the same decade. The chapter interrogates how these roles are organized and represented within the archive and the kinds of alternative labor histories that Leigh and her associates produced through her material collections. It looks in particular at how archival preservation offers counternarratives to existing biographical and popular accounts of these aspects of her public profile and star image.