Episode Details

Vivien Leigh won two Academy Awards — for Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire — while fighting a bipolar disorder so severe that it destroyed her marriage to Laurence Olivier, hospitalized her repeatedly, and made every performance a gamble between brilliance and breakdown. The public saw Scarlett O'Hara. The private reality was far more frightening.

This episode traces Leigh from her convent education in India through her audition for Scarlett, her marriage to Olivier, and the manic episodes that turned one of the greatest actresses of the twentieth century into a prisoner of her own mind.

• She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire
• She suffered from bipolar disorder throughout her adult life, with manic episodes that were violent and unpredictable
• Her marriage to Laurence Olivier was destroyed in part by her mental illness, which he struggled to understand or manage
• She died of tuberculosis at fifty-three, having battled the disease alongside her mental illness for decades