That Scarlett Woman...

My friend Scott has the most remarkable DVD collection and he has TONNES of good stuff (the man is like a lending library with his DVDs, God bless him) and chief amongst this was the Tennessee Williams collection. Of the five movies I had seen in this particular collection, I particularly wanted to watch A Streetcar Named Desire again. I had discovered it in high school on late night TV and had immediately become obsessed with it. Particularly did I become enamoured with the extraordinary performance of Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois.

Forever remembered for Scarlett O'Hara and later on, Blanche, she struck a mark in film history and became an icon. What is surprising is that Leigh only made 19 films in her career, from one line bit parts to historic leads. Certainly not all of them were great, in fact, a lot of them were terrible, but she was memorable in all of them. She was basically a stage actress who did part-time work as a major movie star. Despite the variety of her roles, she was primarily a classical stage actress. She played most of the great Shakespearean women's roles, and was judged by no less than John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier respectively to be the best Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth they ever saw. This was surprising, because from the beginning, she had a lot stacked against her. Her looks, her voice and her inexperience all weighed heavily against her. It was only through her own formidable will and faith in herself that she succeeded at all, against incredible odds, and some would say, at a devastating cost.

When she first started out in her career, she was a young married mother who did part-time modelling work. As an actress she had little or no experience, and she had a weak chest with poor projection, and a very light, silly, piping schoolgirl voice that did not bode well for working on the stage, much less in the classical theatre. But for over thirty odd years she worked, studied, trained and knocked herself out to not only strengthen her voice but deepen her characterizations as well.

When one watches her in a truly silly film like, 21 Days Together and listens to her trilling, (almost shrill) tones in her heavy Mayfair accent, one is amazed at the transformation in pitch, depth and power she attains not even a dozen years later in Streetcar. Her heart-wrenching plea of "Don't turn the light on!" to Mitch is the agonized squawk of a woman caught in a painful legtrap. There is nothing dignified in her voice in that moment, but there is transcendant truth in its raw, animal agony. It is painful to listen to because the dignity of tragedy has been stripped out of her voice. It is the sheer desperate madness and panic of a woman drowning in lies.

The story of Leigh's success, and ultimately the tragedy of her life has been told many times, but it still belies the fact that this woman who suffered most of her adult life from recurringly severe physical and mental illness never stopped striving or learning. She worked extremely hard to fulfill her ambition to succeed as an actress. Except for periods of illness, she never stopped working, nor did she stop pushing herself to excel. At the age of fifty she starred on Broadway in a musical, and won a Tony award for Best Actress. Except for a few moments on film, she had never sung before. I have heard a few snippets of the songs, and I was amazed at how well she sang, yes, sang, in a perfectly believable Russian accent.

The irony of all this great success was that she was not a great actress when she started out by any means. She had though, as Laurence Olivier observed, "the most perturbing attraction" he had ever encountered. Charisma coupled with a breathtaking beauty, she was instantly noticeable, and she used that notoriety to get herself work. Sensibly she realized her shortcomings and worked to overcome them, determined to become as she once put it, "a great actress". She gallantly tried to live down her looks for the rest of her career, and hated nothing more than to be told how pretty and beautiful she was. She felt it was a decorative compliment, having no intrinsic value and having nothing to do with how hard she had worked to attain the respect that she finally did achieve. Her partnership with Olivier brought her to dizzying heights of success, but while she was a phenomenally good actress equally comparable if not superior to many of her peers, Olivier was simply a genius onstage, with vocal power and physicality to spare. She could not hope to compete, even if she had been physically strong and healthy enough to do so. Alas, without meaning to, his genius eclipsed his wife's own stellar talent, as it would so often eclipse so many others, and in time, she lost a sense of her own worth as an actress. As a friend aptly described their partnership together, "the engine that drove her work, drove just as strongly as his did, but ultimately, his was the bigger engine."

Thus one can only imagine her frustration when, at the height of her partnership onstage with her husband, she would hear compliments to the both of them along the lines of, "You are the best actor in the world, and you are the most beautiful woman in the world." For a woman who was known to best none other than Noel Coward at word games, who spoke at least five languages fluently and frequently dubbed her own films, who was known to be a shrewd collector of art and an avid bibliophile (she read the entire Dickens canon during the war and wrote a well received review on a biography of Emma Hamilton) the humiliation of being dismissed as a merely decorative beauty in the shadow of her husband's genius must have been intense.

She only made three films after Streetcar, none of them very good, but all of them fascinating viewing in terms of the performances she gave. In each she pushed the depths she had plumbed as Blanche, and her later maturity gave her a ravaged gusto, a fierce, freeing, almost ugly quality that would have been unthinkable in her as a young woman. These films are worth viewing as curiousities, but as Hugo Vickers, her best biographer once said, it is in Streetcar that her heart and soul survives. Viewing her work in this film is to witness the hard work of a sensitive artist, and yes, as Vivien would have hoped, a great actress.