Background and career
Vivian Mary Olivier (née Hartley; 5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967), known professionally as Vivien Leigh ( LEE) and styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. After completing her drama school education, Leigh performed on stage before receiving small roles in four films in 1935, eventually progressing to the role of heroine in Fire Over England (1937). She went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her performances as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had played on stage in London's West End in 1949. For the latter role, she also won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and later won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway musical version of Tovarich (1963).
Despite her fame as a screen actress, Leigh was primarily a stage performer. During her 30-year career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. Later in life, she performed as a character actress in a few films. Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999 the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Leigh as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema. Widely lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that her physical attributes sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress.
At the time, the public strongly identified Leigh with her second husband, Laurence Olivier, who was her spouse from 1940 to 1960. Leigh and Olivier starred together in many stage productions, with Olivier often directing, and in three films. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, and for much of her life she had recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s and ultimately led to her death at age 53.
Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley on 5 November 1913 in British India in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency. She was the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances (née Yackjee; she also used her mother's maiden name of Robinson). Her father was born in Scotland in 1882, while her mother, a devout Catholic, was born in Darjeeling in 1888 and of Armenian and Irish ancestry. Gertrude's parents, who lived in India, were Michael John Yackjee, who was born to an Armenian family that moved to India in 1843 and worked as a clerk for the East India Railway, and Mary Teresa Robinson, who was born to an Irish family killed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and grew up in an orphanage, where she met Yackjee; they married in 1872 and had five children, of whom Gertrude was the youngest. Ernest and Gertrude Hartley were married in 1912 in Kensington, London.
How Vivien Leigh makes money
The couple had invested almost all of their combined savings of $40,000 (equivalent to $920,000 in 2025) in the project, and the failure was a financial disaster for them. She reportedly turned down a studio contract worth $5,000 a week (equivalent to $93,000 in 2025) in order to volunteer as part of the war effort.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (2025-02-01), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
