Vivien Leigh – beautiful, talented but not happy

Vivien Leigh’s ravishing beauty and her high-profile, power-couple marriage to Laurence Olivier, have tended to obscure her undoubted talent as an actress on screen and stage. She is best known for playing Scarlett O’ Hara in Gone with the Wind  and twelve years later Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire, for both of which performances she won Oscars. But her life was marred by the tragedy of her bi-polar condition which led to increasingly erratic and high-risk behaviour, and the tuberculosis which eventually killed her aged 53. A new biography is out next month Dark Star by Alan Strachan which fills in some gaps.

Born 5 November 1913 5.16 pm Darjeeling, India, with a Scottish father and maybe Armenian mother, she was sent to convent school in the UK aged six, and later travelled round Europe with her parents. An early marriage to an older barrister did not stop her move into acting or her affair with Olivier. She was highly-sexed, obsessively so, and in later years took to having sex with strangers in London parks.

She was a Sun Scorpio square a 10^th house Aquarius Moon, which is a tricky combination of intense desire and avoidance of intimacy. Her Moon was in an Air Grand Trine to Venus in Libra trine Saturn, which would further detach her from her feelings. It’s an Air Water chart – which can bring problems as the individual wobbles between thinking and emotional responses. With Uranus on her midheaven she was destined for a different kind of career and in opposition to Neptune would make her highly strung. Her Neptune in Cancer was in a showbizzy conjunction to Mars.

It’s not quite chart I would have expected from stories about her life and temperament. Apart from the intense Scorpio Sun and overly-excitable Mars in Cancer, it doesn’t seem too descriptive. Though her creative 7^th Harmonic, pleasure-seeking 9H, actresses’ 15H and super-star 22H were all strong.

Her relationship with Olivier, 22 May 1907 5am Dorking, England, was a very Neptunian affair. His Venus in Aries was square her Mars, Neptune and her Uranus, so it was a passionate, if not always sensitive, match, one which required space and would be prone to eruptions and ultimately disappointment.

Their relationship chart had a tumultuous Uranus opposition Neptune Venus square Mars opposition Jupiter – so it would be in constant turmoil.

In contrast to her Air Water chart, he was mainly Earth  with a Taurus Sun Mercury, a Virgo Moon and Mars Uranus in Capricorn – and had his own inner demons to contend with.

Behind the glitter lurks all manner of personality problems.