My review of Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh by Alexander Walker.

Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh

by Alexander Walker

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It was on reflection of what would have been Vivien Leigh's hundred and tenth year, 2023, that I revisited Alexander Walker's biography, one I had previously relished, but which had triggered disappointment in some. I've said before: if it's a movieography you want, click on Wikipedia or the Internet Movie Database. There isn't much to see. Leigh didn't make a long list of films comparable to other legends of her standing. This serious actress was at heart a great theatre performer, like her husband Sir Laurence Olivier who, likewise, made some celluloid epics but less than you might think.

So obviously this is no beginners' handbook on Vivien Leigh's movies. It's hardly news that she won two Best Actress Academy Awards for her performances as 'Southern belles': Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had played on stage in London's West End in 1949. Unsurprisingly, she also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway version of Tovarich (1963).

This biography is about the person more than her films. Like many extraordinary talents, Leigh lived with bipolar disorder, no easy thing for any sufferer to work with let alone a star of stage and screen with those impossibly demanding schedules. This affected her twenty-year marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier so much that it ended in heartbreak, Olivier taking up with now great Joan Plowright who became the Lady Olivier we know today.

This multi-award nominee and winner of Oscars, New York Film Critics, Golden Globes and Tonies struggled with major health issues beside her mental ones. Her life and career were marred by those episodes. Recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s, claimed her life at 53. Understandably, she had earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, her career suffering periods of inactivity.

She was born in India, daughter of an English army officer in the Indian Cavalry. The family returned to their native England, Vivien later attending London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She cut short her studies to get engaged to a man who disapproved of theatre work. She had therefore already been married, had a daughter and separated before she resumed her career, doing numerous quality but low-profile acting jobs for several years as she honed her stagecraft.

Then along came Olivier, her great love, and in turn came her brilliant career. Olivier really was her life more than anything, hence this biography's pronounced emphasis on her private life. She was utterly devastated by her divorce and never recovered.

The reader wonders whether it might have been some small consolation to Vivien being posthumously ranked 16th greatest female movie star of all time, in 1999, by the American Film Institute.

A more tragic private figure than any she publicly portrayed, here was a soul we feel for yet celebrate as we work our way through her life, care of this ever-reliable biographer of screen goddesses. I could not help wondering, on my second reading, whether a hundred-and-one-year-old Ms. Leigh might have eventually driven out her demons and made peace with her life, time healing all things and wisdom a natural product of years passing. She would surely have become one mightily wise dame. But as with all the great tragediennes, her life was cut short in her prime, which was perhaps her ultimate preference. She was, after all, quoted by US journalist Radie Harris as confiding that she 'would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him'. Once more, I finished this book hoping this great star and tortured soul is at peace, if not for having kept her great love in life, then in the compensatory assurance of how treasured she will always be by her fans.

My review of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title. 

After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also feared that by reading this I may be disappointed discovering that her fiction was not, after all, dressed up (or down) fragments her own life. 

Such was the dilemma underlying my prevarication in reading this, a slow self-torture not unlike Jean's own which I knew so intimately from her stories. When I mustered the courage to read this it was the milestone I hoped it would be. 

Yes, Jean's fictional books were distinguishable here in her real life. But thankfully, as the saying goes, 'truth is always stranger than fiction'. So I was saved, my dilemma redundant. 

I had a reticence that this felt intrusive, like rummaging through her drawers when she had gone. However, I consoled myself, she would not have disclosed here what she chose not to, nobody was forcing her to say anything. My mother once said, 'I taught you everything you know ... but not everything I know!' Here was my favourite writer inferring likewise with those deliciously pregnant narrative gaps. 

As devotees and biographers have noted, Jean bared her soul in her writing but kept some to herself. I was relieved she did likewise here, retained some small, precious dignity after the literary world had bellowed at her, in her dotage, for forever baring her most intimate truths veiled in gossamer thin fiction. 

Many have concurred it was not just what Jean wrote that was so brilliant: it was what she did not write, those gaps left for the reader's mind to fill. Indeed, one biographer who researched her old drafts revealed that Jean always underwent a severe, almost self-lacerating editing process, originally taught her by ex-lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford. Here she does it one final time as she grinningly waves us farewell, leaving us longing to know what else happened in between these episodes she so tantalisingly punctuates. 

In this Jean includes her first poem, penned the first time her adolescent heart broke. It comprises three simple words written three consecutive times: 'I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.' 

I will not desist revisiting her works whenever I get those Jean Rhys blues. That would be unthinkable. I need to know her words await me. 

This, her last word, was not for this fan the end of Jean Rhys, not something that left me with any disloyal finality or closure on her. Rather, it confirmed that I should start over and read her books from scratch. Again. And again. And again.