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.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the critical and cultural contexts of the study and makes the case for the value of an archival exploration of Vivien Leigh’s working life and career. It positions the book in relation to existing work on Leigh and on star archives and explains how the book as a whole seeks to reframe her legacy. More broadly, the case is made for a reframing of star studies through feminist historiography, focusing on the laboring life of female stars. The introduction outlines the major claims of the book and how it navigates the fields of feminist film historiography, archival theory, and star studies, and details the main archival collections with which the book engages.

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.

“The Vivien Leigh room”

Chapter 6 looks beyond the international and national stories of Vivien Leigh’s archives to examine her presence within one specific region: the South West of England. The chapter explores material collections in regional museums that house a range of artifacts and ephemera related to Leigh’s life. Through Leigh’s first in-laws, the Devon-based Holman family, a material history of her presence in the region has been retained and displayed in a range of local museums, including one founded by her former sister-in-law, Dorothy Holman. By delving into these museums and their collections and working closely with their curators, the chapter examines alternative stories of Leigh’s stardom. It considers the vernacular articulations of global stardom in local environments for local audiences, developed by distinctly localized curatorial agendas.

“A consummate actress, hampered by beauty”

The chapter explores the archival record of Vivien Leigh’s stage and screen craft. It considers how the archive illuminates her struggle to position her performative talent and craft in the “right” way relative to her status as glamourous star body. The chapter interrogates material in her archive at the V&A, her papers at the British Library, and connected archives of those performers and directors with whom she worked. Key case studies include her written correspondence with Laurence Olivier during the filming of Gone with the Wind, which illuminates her approach to male mentorship more broadly across her career. The chapter also focusses on two key aspects of her stage and screen craft often singled out for criticism in the reception of her performances: her voice and physical stamina.

“Her sort of trouble”

The chapter uses material from Vivien Leigh’s British Library papers to forge a new approach to histories of her struggles with mental health. The chapter examines how this particular aspect of her life is represented within the archive. As a case study, I analyze fan letters that were generated in response to press coverage of the breakdown Leigh suffered while filming Elephant Walk in 1953. The chapter shows how predominantly female fan writers corresponded with Leigh. In turn, they capitalized on the simultaneous intimacy and distance of the fan letter to create a platform for self-exploration. More broadly, the chapter considers the cultural frameworks in which such fan-inflected confession gestated. It reads the content of the letters against a backdrop of attitudes toward women’s mental health at this time.

Afterword

In their edited volume Lasting Screen Stars, Lucy Bolton and Julie Lobalzo Wright interrogate one of “the most inescapable realities of the realm of stardom,” the fact that “some stars endure across the decades, enjoying lengthy and high-profile careers, while others fade away, either into obscurity or crystallized at a specific moment in time” (2016, 1). Vivien Leigh is a fitting case study for interrogating this kind of phenomenon. She is a star who has endured, in large part because her star image has remained anchored to one specific character/film. Leigh’s casting as Scarlett O’Hara in ...

The posthumous archive

The chapter looks at alternative kinds of material collections and the archival methods that have been applied to them. These collections originate not from Vivien Leigh’s personal papers but from acts of posthumous collection by a range of other parties. As a central case study, I foreground new research into the practices of the Vivien Leigh Circle, a fan collective established in the late 1960s. I examine the private collections of its membership past and present and how their unofficial curatorial practices have developed over time. Based on original interviews with founding and current members, the chapter looks at clusters of correspondence between Leigh and her fans, exploring how such private, intimate “archives” have transitioned from the domestic spaces of individuals into official repositories like the V&A.