posted May 23, 2009 05:32 AM            

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And in a new book, Frankly, My Dear: Gone With The Wind Revisited, American film critic Molly Haskell delivers the goods.

Haskell takes a fresh look at Scarlett O'Hara, the manipulative Southern belle, and the English star who breathed life, neuroses and her own dangerous sexuality into her.

Before landing the role, Leigh had achieved some success in British films, but was almost totally unknown in Hollywood.

She had fallen in love with Olivier - despite both of them being married - after starring alongside him in Fire Over England.

She revealed her ruthlessness, and determination to land Olivier, when she left her first husband, barrister Leigh Holman, and five-year-old daughter Suzanne at home 'with hardly a backward glance' and took off for Los Angeles.

Of course, she was in pursuit of Olivier, who was in Hollywood filming Wuthering Heights. But according to Gone With The Wind director George Cukor, she was also absolutely determined to play Scarlett.

She was not alone. In the final reckoning, some 1,400 actresses had been considered for the role, 90 of whom were given screen tests.

Leigh inveigled an introduction to the producer, David O. Selznick, through his brother, Myron, who announced: 'Here is your Scarlett.'

Within days of meeting David Selznick, Leigh had mastered the Southern accent - some insist that she had been practising for months - and the prize role of Scarlett was hers.

She worked 122 days to Clark Gable's 73, and she was exhausted at the end of shooting. There were fits of hysteria and tears.

She would yell at Selznick in the way she later screamed at Olivier during 'tempests of psychosis' that caused havoc in their marriage and eventually destroyed it.

Towards the end of filming, she was working a hectic 18 hours a day, always desperate to finish so she could go back to Olivier.

According to Haskell: 'Their quickie weekends together were by all accounts frenzied sexual marathons, largely having to do with Leigh's unusually large appetites.

'From the early days in England, their relationship had always been consuming and physical,' Haskell tells us.

'Reporters commented that even when their spouses [actress Jill Esmond and Leigh Holman] were on the set, they had a hard time keeping their hands off each other.

'And now, in her rare breaks from Gone With The Wind, she and Olivier would spend an entire three days in a hotel room, ordering room service and locked in each other's arms, described in blunt, joyous, four-letter exclamations in her later account of the trysts.'

Olivier's pet name for Leigh - whom he married in August 1940, 14 months after Gone With The Wind was completed - was Puss.

Only later did he complain to friends that her sexual needs eventually became 'burdensome'.

Nevertheless, during their Old Vic tour of Australia in the late Forties - the height of Leigh's fame as Scarlett O'Hara - Olivier seemed to handle her demands manfully enough.

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posted May 23, 2009 05:32 AM            

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Each night, one hour before the curtain went up, their dressing-room door was locked for what a stage manager called 'obvious reasons'.

Olivier also dealt with her extramarital-affairs (including a notorious public fling with Peter Finch) with aplomb, or perhaps it was merely an exhausted sense of relief. {{ ?????}}

Years later, in Hollywood, aged 61, and not long before his own posthumous Oscar triumph in Network, Finch told me: 'I loved Vivien. But once she set her sights on you, you were a gonner, mate... her affection was lethal.

'Sex was a sickness with her. It was not only a powerful stimulant for her, but as addictive as any drug. I was a young man then, and it was like Christmas every day - but poor Larry. Poor Larry. She must have been killing him.'

Even during the making of Gone With The Wind, there were ominous signs of the problems to come.

'Feeding into the intensity of her performance was not only the longing to get back to her lover,' says Haskell, 'but also the feverishness of as-yet undiagnosed mental and physical illnesses, the manic-depression and tuberculosis that would begin to engulf her life almost as soon as the film was over.'

Meanwhile, dissatisfied with her opening scene, Selznick waited until the end of filming to ask the exhausted Leigh to reshoot it.

'But by then,' reports Haskell, 'Leigh looked too old and haggard, so he released her into the arms of her Larry. After a weekend of carnal rejuvenation, Leigh came back for retakes, looking as dewy and virginal as a 17-year-old.'

Her need for regular and prodigious sex became increasingly urgent as she grew older, and her emotional episodes became more acute.

According to another biographer, during the periods of depression that now plagued her, 'she had sexual fantasies that distressed her, believing that if she were left alone at these times she might be moved to pick up a stranger on the street, bring him home and seduce him'.

Sometimes she would 'feel a compulsion' to invite a taxi driver, in whose cab she had ridden, to come back to the house with her. The same urge would overtake her when she was alone with a deliveryman.

A mutual friend told me of the time she had arranged to have tea with Leigh at her Chelsea home.

'The appointment was for four o'clock. I waited and waited. She finally turned up two hours late - dishevelled, her stockings torn, buttons missing from her blouse.

'But looking very happy.God knows where she had been, but it was obvious what she had been up to.'

One of her oldest and dearest friends, Noel Coward, lost patience with her. 'She is obviously in a bad way, drinking far, far too much,' he wrote in his diary.

'I know she is unhappy inside, but her predicament has been entirely her own fault from the first... she is certainly barmy up to a point, but sh]e has been so spoilt and pampered for so many years that the barminess becomes ugly and dull.

[b'For all her beauty and charm and sweetness, she has let Larry down for years and really tormented him. If he can succeed in breaking away, good luck to him.' [/b]

The marriage ended in 1960. In a curt announcement, Leigh said: 'Lady Olivier wishes to say that Sir Laurence has asked for a divorce in order to marry Miss Joan Plowright. She will naturally do whatever he wishes.'

It was a sad end for a great love which, in its early days, had so captured the public's imagination.

To those who knew them well, however, it was clear from the start that Leigh's extraordinary appetites and fiery passions would eventually destroy them. It was never a question of if it would end - just when.

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For one, she does sound like a classic sex addict who needed it for power and to avoid conforntation from some other issues.addictions are always about that, be it food,drugs,alcohol or sex.Mant other sites report that she Bi-polar and Manic depressive and that was the cause of her nymphomania

posted May 23, 2009 05:52 AM            

within 1 degree only.

Saturn conjunct ascendent !!!

Moon conjunct M.C.

Sun Trine Neptune

Venus Square Mars

Mars Opposition Mars

Mars Conjunction The North Node

Neptune Square Venus

Neptune Conjunction The North Node

North Node Conjunction Saturn

North Node Square Pluto

South Node Conjunction The Moon

posted May 23, 2009 06:00 AM            

Karma conjunct Valentine !!!

Kaali opposed Lilith

Chiron and Juno conjunct his Eros

Siva conjunct his Moon !!!

there are many aspects but i only take conjunctrs and oppositions into account mind.

posted May 23, 2009 06:11 AM            

Vivien to Lawrence

Moon conjunct Dr. sun

Kaali conjunct Dr. Venus

Mars conjunct Dr. Siva

That is one heack of a double aspect to have !!!!

Juno conjunct Dr. Jupiter and Neptune

Chiron conjunct Dr. Lilith

that explains she hurt him with her infidelity and excess sexual appetite . I think the siva - Kaali aspects also add to it !

Now Lawrence to Vivien , Natal to Draco

Chiron conjunct Dr. Moon

Pluto conjunct dr. Saturn

Eros conjunct Dr. Chiron !!!

Valentine opposed Dr. Lilith

Eros conjunct Dr. Juno

posted May 23, 2009 06:24 AM            

Vivien to Lawrence

dr. I.C. conj Dr. sun

Dr. Venus conuunct his Dr. chiron conjunct Karmaa !!!!!!

Dr. Moon conjunct his Dr. Ascendent

Dr. Pluto opposes his dr. Venus

Dr. Chiron conjunct his Dr. Jupiter , Lilith and Ceres

Dr. Eros opposed Dr. Moon

Dr. Valentine opposed his Dr. Venus and Juno

Lawrence to vivien , draco to draco

His Dr. AC also conjunct her Dr. moon like above....its a DW !!!!

Dr. Venus conj his Dr. Valentine and opp his Dr. Pluto

Dr. Eros conjunct Dr. Eros

To think a couple has such aspects and have such a bumpy marriage of infidelity and a tragic end .

Draco aspects show it was a karmic lesson and relationship, but wow . If this is what soulmates look like.....sheeeehhhhh

posted May 23, 2009 06:57 AM            

Which asteroids do you mainly use?
Kaali, Eros, Lilith (or is that the Black Moon), Valentine, Karma?

posted May 23, 2009 08:28 AM            

I think also her husband said she suffered a miscarriage and the fall-out messed with her mental health. I can appreciate that having walked down that street.

Humans are imperfect and contradictory. That being so I find it only reasonable to expect soulmates to let each other down from time to time. Forgiveness is a human quality on the other side of the balance. I think my Libran Moon is breaking out here a little bit.

posted May 23, 2009 06:45 PM            

She had problems and sex was an escape. I don't see why we have to say she had problems with her sexuality, because it seems to me like she just found a degree of escape through the sex.

posted May 23, 2009 07:43 PM            

Love Lives - Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh

by Michael Sauter

He played Romeo to her Juliet, Antony to her Cleopatra. And not only on the stage. Off-stage, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh carried on a tumultuous twenty-year romance that rivaled any they ever portrayed in a play. Dubbed 'the King and Queen of the theater' by fellow actor John Gielgud, they were truly show business royalty, as dazzlingly glamorous a couple as had ever captured the fancy of an adoring public. He was Heathcliff. She was Scarlett O'Hara. That two such romantic icons should also be husband and wife seemed like Hollywood fantasy. In the end, that fantasy was too good to be true.

It was love at first sight, at least for Leigh. As a 22-year-old starlet in 1935, she saw Olivier on the London stage and was instantly enthralled by his brilliant star power-and brooding good looks. 'Someday I am going to marry Laurence Olivier,' she told a friend, with the same conviction she'd later announce, 'I shall play Scarlett O'Hara' - years before landing the part. Such bold declarations were typical of the headstrong Leigh, who always knew what she wanted, and usually got it.

For Olivier, the attraction was almost as immediate. He too had first seen his future love on the stage and had been struck by her 'magical looks' and 'beautiful poise.' But, he wrote in his memoirs, 'she also had something else: an attraction of the most perturbing nature I had ever encountered.' Soon, a mutual friend introduced the two actors, beginning a professional acquaintance that spontaneously combusted into full-blown passion. There was only one complication. Make that two: At the time, both Olivier and Leigh were already married.

Olivier had wed fellow actor Jill Esmond in 1930. Even as he was falling in love with Leigh, his wife was carrying his first son, Tarquin. Leigh, meanwhile, was already a mother. She had married barrister Leigh Holman in 1932 - at only 19 - and had given birth to her daughter Suzanne within the year. Both Olivier and Leigh had thought themselves happily married, but after meeting each other, they realized how much romance they'd been missing. Olivier would call their attraction 'fatefully irresistible.' After two years of 'rapturous torment,' they gave into fate and ended their marriages.

'The great passion and adoration these two had for each other was truly electric,' once recollected Sunny Andrews, Vivien Leigh's long-time secretary. 'The way he looked at her and vice-versa - their responses were pure delight - almost as if, 'Wait until I get you alone' and 'Yes, love, how soon?''

Yet it was more than sex that charged this magnetic attraction. Quite simply, these two completed each other. Olivier inspired Leigh; he was her hero, her mentor, her soulmate. He shared her artistic aspirations, and moved her to aim even higher. In turn, she inspired him. This beautiful, sensual, witty woman not only sparked his intellect and libido, but also his personality. 'I never saw such a transformation,' said one Olivier chum. 'He went from a rather somber chap to an upbeat bon vivant.'

Having discreetly lived together for the three years it took to finalize their divorces, Olivier and Leigh were finally free to marry in 1940. They slipped away for a civil ceremony, witnessed only by friends Garson Kanin and Katharine Hepburn. They next day, however, they announced their nuptials to the world, with a fanfare befitting a king and queen. By then, Leigh's Gone With the Wind and Olivier's Wuthering Heights had made them international stars, and they seemed to thrive on the attention. Portraying lovers on stage only seemed to intensify their offstage ardor.

The early '40s were the happiest time for the Oliviers. Not even the outbreak of World War II could slow them down. Though Olivier served in the Royal Air Force, training fighter pilots, he and Leigh stayed active in the theater, even entertaining Allied troops on a tour of North Africa. In 1944, the couple bought a sprawling country home that became a weekend retreat. Here, the king and queen held court at lavish dinner parties. They guest list typically included such theatrical luminaries as Noel Coward, Orson Welles, and Marlene Dietrich; the revelry often lasted until dawn.

But their domestic bliss was short-lived. The years that followed the war brought changes, especially for Leigh. Always in delicate health, she habitually worked herself to exhaustion, and as early as 1944, this began to take its toll: While filming Caesar and Cleopatra, Leigh fell and suffered a miscarriage that left her deeply depressed. The next year, she was stricken with tuberculosis, in the midst of her triumphant stage return in The Skin of Our Teeth. A long convalescence followed, during which Olivier began to conquer the theater world. While he was wowing London with the classics, she could only sit home.

Eventually Leigh returned to work, but she never regained her stature as Olivier's superstar equal. When he was knighted in 1947, she fell further into her husband's shadow. This was more than a blow to her ego. Vivien's fading fame cut right to her heart. 'She had to be successful because she had so much regard for Larry,' Olivia de Havilland once said. 'She wanted to measure up…to keep his admiration and his love.'

But even if Leigh could have settled for second billing in their marriage, fate and her own frail health intervened. In addition to her physical ailments, Leigh began to suffer serious mood swings that were later diagnosed as manic-depression. One night she'd be the hyper-active life of the party; the next she'd be lost in dark clouds of despair. With their once idyllic home life in upheaval, Olivier increasingly sought refuge in his work at the theater.

Still, he tried to include her in his success. A 1948 tour of Australia brought them back together on stage, yet Olivier came home feeling he had 'lost' Leigh. Within months she told him she didn't love him anymore. 'I felt as if I had been sentenced to death,' Olivier wrote. 'The central force in my life, my heart in fact…had been removed.'

And yet they stayed together more than ten years afterward, as if clinging to the memory of the great passion that had flamed so brightly and then burned out - as if each realized that the other had indeed been the love of a lifetime. Then too, they were bound by a public who still saw them as the King and Queen. So they carried on as 'the Oliviers,' successfully performing together on stage, while living ever more separately at home.

In the early '50s, Leigh's mental health grew more unstable. There were periods of heavy drinking, and an affair with actor Peter Finch. Eventually, in 1953, she suffered a breakdown, and spent time in a mental hospital. There, she received the first of the many shock treatments she was to undergo throughout her later years. Home after that first treatment, Leigh seemed a stranger. Feeling increasingly helpless, Olivier buried himself in his work.

Their marriage would endure another miscarriage, more bouts of manic-depression, and less meaningful opportunities for the now middle-aged Leigh. Finally, in 1957, it was Olivier who could no longer continue. By then he'd become involved with actress Joan Plowright. He left Leigh in 1958; they divorced in 1960. Olivier married Plowright three months later.

'Until her dying day, I don't think Vivien believed Olivier was beyond recall,' said a colleague who knew her in later years. Still, life did go on without Larry. During the sixties, Leigh revived her career, starring on screen in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and Ship of Fools (1965), and even winning a Tony in the Broadway production of Tovarich (1963). She also found romance with actor Jack Merivale, a friend since 1940. But her manic-depressive interludes never really left her, nor did her incipient TB, which fatally flared up again in 1967. She died at her home on the night of July 7. Hearing the news in his hospital room, where he was being treated for cancer, Olivier immediately discharged himself, and rushed to Leigh's deathbed. 'I stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us,' he later wrote. 'It has always been impossible for me not to believe that I was somehow the cause of Vivien's disturbances.'

But if Leigh had ever shared that belief, she had long since forgiven him. She would go to her grave still loving Olivier, telling writer Radie Harris shortly before her death that she'd 'rather have lived a short life with Larry than face a long life without him.'

Olivier would outlive Leigh for 22 years, during which he remained devotedly married to Plowright. Yet in the end, it was clear that he'd never gotten over Vivien either: In 1986, a visitor to his home found the 80-year-old Olivier sitting alone, watching Leigh in an old film on television. 'This, this was love,' he said, in tears. 'This was the real thing.'

posted May 23, 2009 08:12 PM            

It just seems to me like she was at the absolute golden pinnacle of her life, love, career, and when her health began to decline was when the career went downhill, depression set in. I can only imagine how hard it must have been to live in the shadows as an overachiever

posted May 24, 2009 01:26 AM            

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I haven't looked into this, but I heard Leigh was bipolar. If so, her manic phases probably took on a sexual expression.

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Yes, thats what most sites say, she was even subjected to Electro - convulsive therapy

I feel very sad for her, i fell in love with her hen i saw " Gone with the wind ", she was a magnificent actress.

And she was half indian but she hid that for personal or professional reasons.

I made this thread becasue i thought they were soulmates and wanted to explore their synastry - but then i read that awful piece at the Mail and had second thoughts.

Its horrible that two people so in love ended up hurting each other and i wanted to see if their synastry had a corollary so we could see a pattern.

VIG