The ‘crazy’ secret life of screen legend Vivien Leigh

Of course, the one time Vivien Leigh played someone “normal”, she went crazy.

Leigh specialized in portraying mad women: Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and the mad and damaged Blanche du Bois from A Streetcar Named Desire. But in 1953 she agreed to star in the film Elephant Walk, about a young bride who follows her husband to Sri Lanka.

“Oh, the happiness of not having to go crazy, commit suicide or think about murder,” the 39-year-old actress told reporters at the time. “My character is … a normal healthy girl.” Two months later, she was in a mental asylum.

A new biography, “Where Madness Lies: The Double Life of Vivien Leigh,” by Lyndsy Spence (Pegasus Books, out Tuesday) chronicles Leigh’s harrowing descent into mental illness.

It focuses on the last 14 years of the “Gone With the Wind” actress’ life, beginning with her divorce in 1953.

Leigh already had two Oscars and was married to Laurence Olivier when she started filming Elephant Walk.

But she was having trouble getting good scripts and her marriage was falling apart – thanks to Olivier’s frequent infidelities and her own bipolar disorder.

She spent most of the shoot in Sri Lanka sending Olivier “messy” postcards. She stayed up late drinking and arrived on set bloated and tired.

She had a meltdown when the dresser tried to put her in shorts; “My legs are not designed for shorts”, cried the petite actress.

She entered into a relationship with her leading man, Australian actor Peter Finch, occasionally mistaking him for her husband, calling him “Larry” and begging him to sleep with her.

Things got worse when the production moved to Hollywood. During the flight to Los Angeles, Leigh screamed that the wing was on fire and tried to jump from the plane. She tore off her clothes and tore her dress down the middle, fighting with Finch as flight attendants restrained her and shoved sleeping pills down her throat.

Once in Tinsel Town, she burst into the bedroom Finch shared with his wife, Tamara, at 2 a.m., tore off the sheets and screamed: “How could you sleep with him? You are my lover.”

She cut Tamara’s clothes and threatened to kill the Finches’ 3-year-old daughter, Anita. (Leigh had a daughter with her first husband, Leigh Holman, in 1933, but she was never the motherly type: After the birth, she nicknamed her “Toosoon.”)

Paramount eventually dropped Leigh from the picture, replacing her with Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier arrived to bring his troubled wife back to England – heavily sedated so she wouldn’t make a scene. “We’re really home, aren’t we?” she asked him when they arrived at Croydon Airport.

Instead, he left her in the Netherlands Asylum. There, nurses stripped her of her clothes, put her into a coma, and gave her an ice bath.

She periodically awoke to find herself strapped to a chair, receiving electroconvulsive therapy shocks.

ECT left her with singed hair and burn marks and affected her memory. When Olivier finally saw her again, weeks later, he was in shock. “The pale face, marked by ECT, and the colorless eyes were of a stranger,” writes Spence. He believed the treatment had robbed her of the “best parts”. “She was no longer the girl he fell in love with.”

They were both married when they met in 1936. Leigh was 23; Olivier was 29 years old.

They dated for two years before eloping together. “I was only half alive before I met Vivien,” said Olivier. She was beautiful, fierce, passionate and unpredictable.

In 1937, he cast her as Ophelia in his Hamlet, and she “flew at him like a demon” backstage. When she was filming Gone With the Wind, she sent him her used chopsticks in New York. “I don’t think there ever was a couple so much in love,” he said when they finally married in 1940. “Our love affair has been just the most divine of fairy tales, hasn’t it?” she replied.

If ECT erased something in Leigh, it didn’t necessarily “cure” her illness. She continued to have manic episodes – cleaning walls, picking up imaginary dirt from the floor, breaking windows, walking naked and throwing money out of windows.

She was obsessed with Finch, stalking his family before he came crawling back to her. Meanwhile, Olivier slept with his colleagues. The pair tried to have a baby in a last ditch effort to save their union, but Leigh failed. They divorced in 1960.

Leigh would eventually go through five rounds of ECT. However, despite her fragile state, she never stopped working. She did Shakespeare through Australia and South America.

She did a musical on Broadway. During that grueling run, in 1963, she burst onto the scene – breaking character and going into her co-star’s dressing room and tearing up pictures of his family. She died in 1967, aged 53, of tuberculosis.

She refused doctors’ orders and continued to smoke and entertain guests from her bed.

The day after she died, Olivier came to her flat in London to “beg for forgiveness for all the evil that had arisen between us”.

“The only one I ever loved was Leigh,” he later said. He was not alone.