Vivien Leigh

Vivian Mary Hartley took small film roles in 1935 after drama school, then landed the heroine in Fire Over England two years later. In 1939 she became Scarlett O'Hara and won her first Academy Award, a performance that would shadow her for life. Though the public saw her as a screen actress, she spent most of her thirty-year career on stage, playing Shaw and Coward heroines and Shakespeare's great women - Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth. She married Laurence Olivier in 1940 and they became the theatre's most watched couple, starring together in multiple stage productions and three films, though the partnership earned her a reputation for difficulty. In 1949 she played Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in London's West End, then took the role to film in 1951 and won her second Oscar and the Volpi Cup. She won a Tony for the musical Tovarich in 1963, and later worked as a character actress. Tuberculosis, diagnosed in the mid-1940s, returned in waves throughout her life and killed her in 1967 at fifty-three.