From Larry with lust...Olivier's X-rated letters to Vivien Leigh seen for first time
- Previously unpublished letters reveal intense passion during affair
- Olivier wrote more than 200 letters to Gone With The Wind star Leigh
- The Hollywood couple married in 1940 - but were divorced 20 years later
- Letters are held in the archives of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum
From its adulterous beginnings to the final years of cold indifference, the relationship between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh was one of the great love stories of the 20th Century.
Now the story of their steamy passion – and its eventual demise – can be told in the great actor’s own words, as a cache of previously unpublished letters is made available to the public for the first time.
Olivier wrote more than 200 letters to Gone With The Wind star Leigh over the course of their affair. It began in 1936, when the two screen icons were both locked into their first marriages, and ended in their divorce in 1960. The following year, Olivier married Joan Plowright, the actress who would remain his wife until he died in 1989.
Here The Mail on Sunday presents a revealing selection of Olivier’s correspondence, held in the archives of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and which curators are making available for the first time.
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Passion: Olivier (left) and Leigh (right) on screen together in 1936, the year their affair began, in the film 'Fire Over England'. Their turbulent relationship ended in divorce in 1960
The ardent early years
In the early years, when the infatuated Olivier said he ‘worshipped’ Leigh and likened life without her to ‘purgatory’, he wrote candidly sexual declarations of his love.
In one undated letter believed to be from 1938 or 1939, he wrote: ‘I woke up absolutely raging with desire for you my love... Oh dear God how I did want you. Perhaps you were stroking your darling self.
I love and worship you, me jewelkin - Oliver to Leigh
‘Oh dear sweet, I haven’t done anything. I’ve often thought of it, but it isn’t that I want to satisfy myself so much because I wouldn’t do that without you, so I’m not going to if I can help it. I know it won’t be right or do any good.
'If we loved each other only with our bodies I suppose it would be alright. I love you with much more than that. I love you with, oh everything somehow, with a special kind of soul.’
On April 23, 1939, he wrote: ‘I am sitting naked with just my parts wrapped in your panties. My longing for you is so intense.’ In a footnote, he added: ‘I’m loving and adoring and want you so.’
In an undated letter at about the same time he said: ‘I do really love and worship you, my jewelkin. You are in my thoughts and weighing so heavily in my heart all the time. I am only existing until I see you again and only just managing to do that.’
Playful: the couple pictured at home in London in 1950. The couple married in 1940, and were divorced in 1960. In the early years, the infatuated Olivier said he ‘worshipped’ Leigh and likened life without her to ‘purgatory'
In another undated letter the actor told her that he longed for her embrace: ‘I am in your arms and your are stroking and coddling me and I am doing little more than grunting and nuzzling (except adoring and drawing all thought of life from you).’
Olivier was both relieved and excited when Leigh landed the role of Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With The Wind. He wrote: ‘The idea of you playing Scarlett is wonderful… in fact it’s glorious and magnificent. [I’m] sure no one can teach you anything about Scarlett.’
But Olivier’s enthusiasm soon turned sour when Leigh told him she was struggling with the role. Both worried – needlessly as it turned out – that the film would flop and that its producer David Selznick would cancel plans to make Leigh a huge star.
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On August 2, 1939, he wrote: ‘My poor little precious you do sound unhappy. But the plain sense of it is – and this is very hard to hear – that not only have you got to be good in this if you can, and if you can’t you’ve got at least to be good enough from Selznick’s angle to have your option taken up because you have got to justify yourself in the next two or three films by proving that the presumable failure of Gone WTW was not your fault...
Star-crossed lovers: The couple appeared on stage as Romeo and Juliet in 1940, the same year that they married
‘You have got to be damn smart to make a success of your career in pictures which is ESSENTIAL for your self-respect... I am afraid you may become just boring. Never to me... But to yourself and because of that to others.’
Olivier had to continually remind Leigh that the scandalous nature of their relationship meant they couldn’t be seen together in public, even when their affair became an open secret.
On May 30, 1939, he wrote: ‘I have come to the conclusion you’re very naughty. We are a popular scandal, or rather a public one. Therefore it is only reasonably good taste to be as unobtrusive as possible. Can you dance and be gay and carry on like the gay happy hypocrite days? No my love you cannot. Why because of your fame, tripled with our situation – quadrupled with the fame there off.’
Olivier and Leigh were finally free to marry in 1940 following their respective divorces. Initially married life did nothing to dampen the couple’s passion. In 1945, Olivier wrote: ‘It is not possible to express my feelings and thoughts about you my dear one. I long for you with such a wretchedness.’
Leigh responded in kind in letters sent during the 1950s. On August 1, 1950, while on a plane she wrote: ‘Oh sweet Baba. If we were together I expect this would seem quite exciting, but then that applies to everything in life.’
Later in the decade she wrote: ‘Whenever you think of Me my Larry-boy you will know I am with you adoringly Vivien.’
The end of the affair
Yet while Leigh never stopped loving Olivier, by the late 50s the marriage was over in all but name. Leigh suffered a serious of mental breakdowns and Olivier tired of her extramarital affairs and erratic behaviour. The couple divorced in 1960.
In a letter from the early 1960s, Olivier wrote of how he was grateful for being ‘set free’, and urged Leigh to make a fresh start with her new love Jack Merivale. ‘What horror it must have been for you and I want to say thank you for understanding it all for my sake... You did nobly and bravely and beautifully and I am very oh so sorry, very sorry, that it must have been much hell for you, and I am very grateful to you for enduring it and setting me free to enjoy what is infinitely happy for me. Oh God Vivling, how I do pray that you will find happiness now.’
Fear: Leigh (left) as Scarlett O'Hara in the Oscar-winning classic Gone With The Wind - which she secretly feared would be considered a flop and ruin her burgeoning career
In another letter he wrote: ‘Please do take great care of Jack. He loves you and however saint-like don’t try [him] too hard – he’s a real man and he loves you wonderfully well – keep hold of that. It’s infinitely precious.’
He apologised to Leigh when she learned from the media that he was to remarry. But he urged her to confine their relationship to the past.
In happier times: The pair were globally renowned for their public displays of affection and their intense passion
‘Thank you so much for the most wonderful roses. I can’t pretend that viewing them did not distress me because such thoughts always do because you know Darling, don’t you, that I can’t return them, those thoughts and mementos of romantic occasions. I am so dearly sorry about the beastly way you found out, [but] I do, as you know, want to get married – and the less we stir up about it the better for me and I’m sure for you too.’
Leigh did her best to remain a part of Olivier’s life but he was keen to keep his distance. In an undated letter written from Brighton he said: ‘Please do not think I am being aloof. I have thought it all over very deeply and I am quite sure now that for all our sakes it would be much better for me to continue the plan I decided upon two years ago for us not to meet for the present.’
Olivier’s attitude meant Leigh was desperate for every letter she received. On February 11, 1963 she wrote: ‘Darling Larry, you can never know how very much your letter meant to me today. How really adorable of you to take time to write.’
In 1966, Leigh wrote to Plowright after she had given birth to her third child with Olivier. In response Olivier told Leigh not to correspond with his wife again, saying: ‘You must not I’m afraid expect an answer. She is too desperately ill to think of turning her hand to letter writing’
On May 28, 1967, Olivier penned his last letter to Leigh – five weeks before her death. It ended simply: ‘Sincerest love darling, your Larry.’
- The V&A is home to the UK’s national collection of theatre and performing arts and a changing selection of material from the Vivien Leigh archive is on display in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Galleries. The archive is available for consultation by appointment and digital records of selected material will also be available on the V&A’s Search the Collections database. For more infomation, visit: http://www.vam.ac.uk/
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