Vivien Leigh would have turned 100 years old this year and to mark the occasion, the Victoria and Albert Museum has acquired a collection of memorabilia from the Hollywood icon’s life. Some of the pieces will go on display this fall.
According to the BBC, the collection includes letters the Gone With The Wind star wrote to her husband, Laurence Olivier, along with annotated film and theater scripts, photographs and diaries. Her diaries cover her life from 1929, when she was 16, to her death in 1967.
Deadline notes that the collection also includes her awards, highlighted by her Oscars for Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. There’s also a guest register with signatures from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Orson Welles, Judy Garland, Rex Harrison and other Hollywood legends.
There’s also an incredible letter from Tennessee Williams, who praised Leigh’s performance as Blanche in Elia Kazan’s Streetcar. “It is needless to repeat here my truly huge happiness over the picture and particularly your part in it. It is the Blanche I had always dreamed of and I am grateful to you for bringing it so beautifully to life on the screen,” Williams wrote.
The archive was acquired from her grandchildren.
“It really explores the life of one of Great Britain's most celebrated performers," curator Keith Lodwick said in an interview with the BBC. “The archive has never been publicly available before so we're discovering nuggets of information about Vivien Leigh that haven't been documented before and have given a fresh insight to her life.”
image: Wikimedia Commons
