"I'll think about it tomorrow." Vivien Leigh

I’m not sure what constitutes a tragic life. I’m sure I don’t have one certainly. Some people’s lives might pass through tragedy or end in one, but I’m not sure you can have a tragic life. I mean, the whole life? It seems unlikely. Maybe those who are born into abject poverty or famine and die early, millions of whom we never hear, but outside of that, such a description reads as indulgent.

Vivien Leigh is one of whom it is often said had a tragic life. There was sadness in her life, haunted by bipolar disorder and battling tuberculosis. Her manic episodes were frightening to behold. They contributed to the end of her marriage to Laurence Olivier and cost her work in her career. And the TB eventually killed her at the young age of 53 in 1967, which sounds like the stuff of melodrama transplanted into late 20^th Century.

However, reading Alexander Walker’s 1987 biography Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, one is not left with an impression of tragedy. The woman had so much joie de vivre I think she would kick you in the shins if you described her life as tragic or even sad. She had a happy childhood, three long-term relationships with the best men for that time of her life, a career that can be called, with all due caution, wildly successful, and died loved and cared for and wealthy, and had tremendous fun along the way.

Her hospitality and generosity were legendary. She took delight in decorating her stately homes and transforming their gardens. Friends had to put a curb on her spending for opening night gifts lest her impulses lead to her over-spending. Guests at her homes would find fresh flowers from her own garden, cut by her own hand, every day. The weekends, for multiple guests, would be filled with food, drink, games and sports. Few could keep up with her for long, but many loved trying.

She is a testament to the power of positive thinking. Her first sight of both first husand Leigh Holman and second Laurence Olivier prompted her to say to a friend,  “That’s the man I’m going to marry” and she did. She read “Gone with the Wind” and told friends who were positing her and Olivier as Rhett and Scarlett “Larry won’t play Rhett but I shall play Scarlett O’Hara” and similarly declared she would play Blanche Dubois and took that role from theatre to film to her second academy award. Not all her predictions worked out so happily but that’s not a bad average.

All of which is not to dismiss the pain and sorrow that was in her life. But I suppose in the end what you make of another person’s life is the same of what you make of your own. Focus on the positive and things can look good. Focus on the sad and soon that’s all you will ever see. I know where Vivien Leigh would have been looking