Dark Star: A Biography of Vivien Leigh, by Alan Strachan

John Gielgud once wrote to Vivien Leigh, just as she commenced her career on stage and screen, to observe that her striking beauty might “always be more hindrance than help to your acting. Almost incidentally either it blinds the critical faculty or produces a perverse determination to pick holes” (Strachan xviii). His warning would prove prescient: it is Leigh’s beauty—regarded as exotic and, with the knowledge of her mental and physical health problems, “fragile”—that still frames much of the biographical and critical discussion of her performances and of her stardom.