Academy Award for Best Actress

1939

Vivien Leigh 

as

Scarlett O'Hara

Gone with the Wind

Vivian Mary Hartley, later known as Vivien Leigh (5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967), was an English stage and film actress. She won two Academy Awards for Best Actress for her performances as "Southern belle" Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. She also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway version of Tovarich (1963).

After her drama school education, Leigh appeared in small roles in four films in 1935 and progressed to the role of heroine in Fire Over England (1937). Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. Despite her fame as a screen actress, Leigh was primarily a stage performer. During her 30-year stage career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. Later in life, she played character roles in a few films.

To the public at the time, Leigh was strongly identified with her second husband Laurence Olivier, to whom she was married from 1940 to 1960. Leigh and Olivier starred together in many stage productions, with Olivier often directing, and in three films. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, as for much of her adult life, she had a bipolar disorder, as well as recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s, which ultimately claimed her life at the age of 53. Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th greatest female movie star of all time.