Great Romances of the 20th Century (1997) s01e04 Episode Script

He was the world's greatest actor, inheritor of the mantle of Garrick and Keane She was one of the world's greatest beauties Together Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were the King and Queen of the British theatre.
Vivien was the luckiest and unluckiest of stars.
A ravishingly petite brunette with striking blue-green eyes, she set out to win her man and succeeded.
For a while their love burned with a fierce passion.
They seemed to live charmed lives.
Awards were showered on them.
''and finally may l say what a deep happiness it has been to me to have received these awards at the hands of one so dear and precious to me as she who has bestowed them''.
The public saw a magical couple.
But they did not see the manic-depression which preyed on Vivien Leigh.
Born in Darjeeling, in lndia, Vivien Leigh had been bitten by the acting bug by the age of seven.
Her first role was Mustard Seed in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
ln 1931 the aspiring actress married an older man, Leigh Holman, had a daughter and launched herself on a stage and film career.
Laurence Olivier also got off to an early start.
His precocious genius was noted when, as a 14-year-old schoolboy, he played Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew.
By 1930 he was established as a dashing romantic lead and married to actress Jill Esmond.
ln 1930 Olivier had appeared on Broadway with Esmond in Noel Coward's comedy of divorce, Private Lives.
The next stop for the couple was Hollywood.
The talkies had arrived and stage stars were in demand.
Olivier was to be the new Ronald Colman but he struggled in Hollywood.
He was chosen to star opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina and then replaced by Garbo's old lover John Gilbert Gilbert was a tragic star.
His career was in free fall and he was drinking heavily.
His reunion with Garbo was suffused with melancholy.
Gilbert's day was gone, Olivier's lay just around the corner.
But his marriage was as unsatisfactory as his film career.
Although she was to bear Olivier a son, Esmond preferred the company of women to that of her husband, who resumed his glittering career on the London stage.
Vivien Leigh, now a rising star, had her eyes on Olivier.
ln 1935 she told a friend that some day, she was going to marry him.
The man who brought them together was the Hungarian-born Alexander Korda, the self-ordained Tsar of the British film industry.
At Denham, outside London, Korda had built his own version of Hollywood in fields not yet swallowed up by the suburbs.
To Denham came extras, writers and technicians, just as they swarmed into the movie factories of the major American studios.
Here, on the Denham lot, Korda built a fragile version of Hollywood's Babylon.
Sets sprang up where cows had grazed.
And in Denham's huge water tank was moored a galleon for Fire Over England, an Elizabethan epic in which Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier co-starred for the first time.
They played the romantic leads and, amid the histrionics of the plot, fell in love.
How could l learn names But one day, Your Grace, the pistol will be loaded, And as the shot echoes across the sea to Spain, the Armada will sail, and then there will be fire over England! Vivien was the complete opposite of the cool Esmond - exciting and unpredictable.
The affair did not go unobserved by Korda, who immediately paired Olivier and Leigh in a thriller, 21 Days.
ln the summer of 1937, while filming 21 Days, Leigh rented a house in the country near Denham.
During filming Korda gave his two stars a week off to stage a production of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle in Denmark.
They had now decided on a life together.
But first they had to finish 21 Days.
''Who the hell are you?'' 'You'd better ask my wife' 'l only say a man's got to pay for his pleasure what do you say, twenty pounds, it can be arranged.
' 'Keep back' 'Get out you filthy Larry! Wanda! 'Do stop pretending everythings over, and l'm afraid' 21 Days was considered so bad that it was shelved for two years.
Meanwhile, Leigh and Olivier set up house together in Chelsea, the London village by the Thames.
After a triumphant season at the Old Vic theatre, Olivier returned to America.
He had conquered Shakespeare but not the studio system.
Now he was cast as Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon's Cathy in Wuthering Heights.
lt was a turning point for Olivier, earning him his first Oscar nomination.
Director William Wyler was the first to coax a film rather than a stage performance from him.
The intensely competitive Vivien Leigh was running hard to catch up.
ln A Yank at Oxford she played a flirtatious wife who clearly found Robert Taylor's mortar board irresistible.
No doubt, the mother in you.
Oh, now l believe you're pulling my leg.
Well, l'm restraining myself the best l can.
You wicked boy.
But Vivien had her eyes fixed on a higher prize For three years producer David O Selznick had been planning his film version of the Margaret Mitchell novel Gone With the Wind.
ln his search for Scarlett O'Hara he had screen tested almost every leading lady in Hollywood, including Paulette Goddard.
But Goddard and a small army of hopefuls had to yield the prize to Vivien Leigh.
lt was an extremely fortunate coincidence that Vivien and Olivier had the same agent, Myron Selznick, the brother of David O Selznick.
Filming on Gone with the Wind had already begun when Myron Selznick introduced Vivien to his brother on the set.
Atlanta was going up in flames and in the glow Selznick saw his Scarlett.
She looked a million dollars but could she play the tempestuous Southern belle? The screen tests showed that she was as fiery as the flames of Atlanta Vivien's relations with co-star Clark Gable were initially wary.
And she balked at the cotton wool Selznick had stuffed down her corsage to give her a cleavage.
But her obvious excitement at securing the part, and her remarkable stamina over months of shooting and endless rewrites made Vivien's Scarlett an epic performance to place alongside the epic quality of Selznick's production.
Her Best Actress Oscar was a foregone conclusion.
Gone With the Wind was premiered in Atlanta in December 1939.
The excitement was intense as Vivien Leigh arrived on the same plane as David O.
Selznick and co-star Olivia de Havilland.
There could be no denying that it was Viviens' day.
De Havilland, and Clark Gable and his wife Carole Lombard, had to take a back seat to the British newcomer.
Atlanta's population had swelled from 300,000 to 1.
5 million as vast crowds waited to catch a glimpse of the stars on their drive into the city.
All eyes were on Vivien Leigh.
lt was her first experience of the American publicity machine.
''Ladies and gentlemen l've spent quite a good deal of my time on Peach Tree Street this year and now that l'm here it feels well just as if l were coming home and the warmth and kindness of your wonderful welcome has made it the happiest home coming l could possibly imagine.
l greet you and l want to thank you with all my heart''.
lt was a golden time for Vivien and her Larry-Boy, as she called Olivier.
After conquering the New York stage he had signed to play Maxim de Winter in Rebecca.
lt was, perhaps, his best film performance, playing an attractive man made vulnerable by a secret past.
Vivien had been desperate to play Maxim's mousy wife, but the part went to Joan Fontaine.
For once, she had failed to get her way.
On the 3rd of September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany.
Leigh and Olivier heard the news in California aboard Douglas Fairbanks Jr's yacht.
Larry got drunk and shouted at fellow sailors, ''This is the end! You're all doomed!'' But the show went on.
ln the spring of 1940, the couple sank their own money into a disastrous New York production of Romeo and Juliet.
lt was becoming increasingly difficult for Larry and Vivien to strike a personal and professional balance in their lives.
Unlike Olivier, Vivien Leigh was always at home in front of the camera.
Even in romantic froth like Waterloo Bridge.
- Hello.
- Hello.
You know, l l thought about you all last night.
Couldn't sleep a wink.
You managed to remember me at last, then.
Yes, barely managed.
Myra, what do you think we're going to do tonight? - Well, l - No, you won't have time for that.
- For what? - For hesitating.
- No more hesitating for you.
- No? Well, what am l going to do instead? You're going to get married.
Larry and Viv's long wait to be free for their own marriage ended in August 1940.
They were married in a three-minute civil ceremony in Santa Barbara.
Vivien had captured her Larry-Boy at last.
Then came a huge screen success when Korda paired them again in a patriotic costume drama, That Hamilton Woman.
Olivier played Lord Nelson and Leigh his fabled mistress Emma Hamilton The idea for the film had been suggested to Korda by Winston Churchill, and its blend of romance and wartime propaganda never failed to reduce the sentimental British war leader to floods of tears.
lt also stoked sympathy for Britain in isolationist America.
The Oliviers had returned to England in January 1941.
ln a blitzed and ration-bound London, Hollywood seemed light years away.
Leigh was gripped by depression.
She suffered bouts of insomnia and became increasingly possessive of her husband.
Perhaps in an attempt to escape, Olivierjoined the Fleet Air Arm, but faulty hearing confined him to non-flying duties.
This left him with plenty of time for filming and beating the drum for the war effort.
''All the stars that we've got on stage, screen and radio have promised to give us their support and we will give you the very best entertainment that we possibly can, and in any case with such an inspiring name sake l hope we will not shame you too much''.
And Scarlett O'Hara lent a hand.
''And l'd like to wish that the boys who fly in this plane will have the greatest good luck always, always''.
On occasion Olivier's Shakespearian bombast went way over the top.
''We will attack, we will conquer, and may god bless our cause.
'' More effective was Olivier's superb screen adaptation of Henry V, which he directed and in which he starred as the warrior king.
But Olivier's triumph was overshadowed by his wife's increasing mental instability and the news that she had been diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis.
After Henry V came a mesmerising performance by Olivier as Richard lll at the Old Vic But who was the man underneath the make-up? Even off the stage, Larry was always ''on''.
''l should like to take this occasion to express my deepest gratitude to all my associates whether artists, technicians or crew with whom, so many of whom with whom so many of which ahh l was terrified of that on ladies and gentlemen, what l'm trying to say is that we've all be together a great many times and its just so much nicer because of that thank you very much''.
By 1945 the Oliviers were the theatrical equivalent of royalty.
They bought Notley Abbey, a medieval hunting lodge and the perfect backdrop for a modern Henry V.
But the strain of competing with her husband was playing havoc with Leigh's increasingly delicate mental equilibrium.
When he denied her the part of Ophelia in his film of Hamlet, she flew into paroxysms of rage.
Olivier's electrifying performance in the title role earned him his only acting Oscar and ensured that Hamlet was the first British film to win a Best Picture Oscar.
Olivier had chosen the 18-year-old Jean Simmons to play Ophelia.
At the premiere Simmons not the 33-year-old Vivien Leigh was the centre of attention.
Leigh began work on film version of Anna Karenina.
Playing Tolstoy's doomed heroine only served to darken her mood.
Like Anna, she had left her husband and child.
Olivier's knighthood, in June 1947, did little to cheer her.
ln 1948 the Oliviers took the Old Vic company to Australia.
The trip turned out to be a public relations and theatrical triumph for the Oliviers, who sparkled together in School for Scandal.
The Australians gave the Oliviers a royal welcome.
Their visit became a dress rehearsal for King George Vl and Queen Elizabeth's tour in the following year.
Behind the scenes there were tussles and tears.
At one point the couple almost came to blows just before Vivien stepped on stage.
Larry and Vivien were still in love, but when hysteria gripped her she became a stranger to her despairing husband.
Later he told Vivien, ''l lost you in Australia''.
Fatally, Olivier also found a protege there, a young actor called Peter Finch.
Olivier encouraged Finch to come to England, where he launched him on a career whose trajectory might follow his own.
Exhausted but seemingly happy, the Oliviers returned from Australia.
lt was a grey homecoming from the blinding light of Australian landscapes.
Meanwhile Peter Finch was finding his feet at Ealing Studios in Train of Events.
Another train of events in real life would make Finch Vivien Leigh's lover.
The awards kept rolling in for Olivier's Oscar-winning Hamlet.
lt was gratifying for Olivier, although privately he was dismissive of cinema.
The stage and the stage alone galvanised his full artistic powers.
For Vivien the escape from the demons which pursued her was work.
She was now excited by the prospect of a new role which she coveted every bit as much as that of Scarlett O'Hara lt was another Southern Belle, but of a very different hue - faded rather than fiery - the tragic Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
Directed by Olivier, Vivien's Blanche was the finest performance of her career.
And one which she was later to repeat on film opposite the electrifying Marlon Brando.
Her identification with the nymphomaniac Blanche was so great that she began to ape her behaviour, seeking the kindness of strangers in a series of fleeting sexual encounters.
lt was Vivien's last memorable screen performance, and it won her a deserved second Oscar.
But her triumph could not ease the tensions which were threatening to overwhelm her marriage.
Larry had allegedly embarked on a homosexual affair with their friend Danny Kaye.
The first, unexpurgated draft of his autobiography admits his many homosexual affairs.
The Oliviers buried personal anguish under professional achievement.
At the St James's Theatre they alternated Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.
When, in 1957, the theatre was threatened with closure, Vivien led a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to save it.
She even harangued the House of Lords from the public gallery.
All to no avail.
The theatre became an office block.
The strain of his marriage was beginning to tell on Olivier.
Vivien was smoking heavily, which was bad for her tubercular lungs, and drinking heavily, which was bad for the medication she was taking.
She veered between elation and the deepest melancholy.
Try as they might, they could not restore the past.
Divorce would provide an answer, but Vivien and Larry were trapped by public acclaim, scrabbling in the ashes of a great passion which had now cooled.
lt was while playing Macheath in a film version of The Beggar's Opera, that Olivier began an affair with a 22-year-old actress, Dorothy Tutin.
lt was not long before Vivien took her revenge.
She had signed to make a movie in Ceylon, Elephant Walk.
Her co-star was to be Peter Finch.
On location, Vivien took Finch into her bed.
Olivier turned up, saw what was going on, did nothing and departed.
Finch told Vivien they must end the affair.
She had been abandoned by both men, but it was Olivier's desertion in Ceylon which most affected her.
When filming resumed in Hollywood, Vivien suffered a complete nervous collapse.
She was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor and flown back to England heavily sedated.
Cruelly, perhaps, the cameras were waiting.
ln spite of the smiles, the sadness was etched in her face.
Somehow Vivien rallied.
ln 1955 the Oliviers appeared together at Stratford in Macbeth.
Macbeth is a domestic tragedy, and in playing it at Stratford the Oliviers were describing the sad contours of their own marriage.
1956 saw a double tragedy.
Alexander Korda, the man who 20 years earlier had brought Larry and Vivien together, suffered a fatal heart attack.
Olivier was about to direct The Prince and the Showgirl, in which he was to co-star with Marilyn Monroe.
The news cameras lingered on Marilyn and her new husband Arthur Miller.
During filming Vivien suffered a miscarriage.
Olivier was now about to tackle his biggest challenge, playing Archie Rice, the broken-down comedian in The Entertainer.
While taking the play on tour, Larry began a new affair with a young actress in the cast - Joan Plowright.
But according to John Gielgud, Larry talked wistfully of his years with Vivien and how she had given him the finest and the most painful moments in his life.
He knew that he had failed to respond to Vivien's devotion to him, and that this had added to her mental anguish.
They were divorced in 1960.
ln 1965, two years before she died, Vivien made her last film, 'Ship of Fools' 'lf you can't get when you want you'd better damn well settle for what you can get.
' Vivien had got and given far more than that.
A beautiful but limited actress she reserved her deepest passion for her Larry-boy.
But in the final count, Olivier's deepest passion had coursed through his art.
Not long before she died, Vivien told a friend: 'Thirty years ago l said that this was the man l was going to marry And what do you think, -l'm still hopelessly in love with him.
' To the day of her death she kept his photograph by her bedside.
A young and beautiful Olivier, the Romeo which Vivien knew no other woman would ever completely possess.