On his wife Vivien Leigh’s 46th birthday, Laurence Olivier took her out for dinner, gifted her a Rolls-Royce and asked for a divorce. It would take months before the marriage of England’s greatest acting couple was dissolved, but it was a giant first step toward a different life for Olivier, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
After 20 years of marriage to the volatile Gone With the Wind beauty, Olivier longed for a simpler, less stressful existence. He believed he could create it with Joan Plowright, an actress 22 years his junior who had costarred with him on the stage in The Entertainer.
“I sometimes feel such a peacefulness come over me when I think of you,” Olivier wrote to his “Joanie” in a love letter. “A feeling devoid of all violence, passion or shattering longing… it makes me go out into the street with a smile on my face.”
Plowright and Leigh shared the same profession but were otherwise opposites. “Vivien was a star, Joan was an actress. Vivien was one of the great beauties of the world, Joan was plain,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s film school and author of Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century. “Vivien’s father had money. Joan came from a sort of lower-middle-class family.”
Olivier, by that point, had been knighted and was considered the finest actor of his day, but his glamorous and drama-filled life made him weary.
For years, Leigh struggled with manic episodes followed by deep depressions often associated with bipolar disorder.
“When Vivien’s illness was in its most serious phase, he fell in love with a much younger woman,” said Galloway. “Joan was solid, down-to-earth and real. Second, she was a very good actress, so they had an artistic affinity. Thirdly, their roots were both lower-middle-class. In some ways, it was a return to the comfort of the world he had grown up in.”
In 1961, Laurence and Plowright were wed in Wilton, Conn., during a lull in their Broadway theater schedules. He was starring in Becket, while Joan was in A Taste of Honey, for which she would win a Tony Award.
“We were starting a new life. And for Olivier, it was a new reality now, and a much deeper approach to life,” said Plowright.
In his final marriage, Olivier became a family man – within limits.
He taught their three children to swim, but his career didn’t often allow him to pick them up from school. “He didn’t have enough time, obviously,” Plowright said.
It wasn’t a perfect marriage, but they found a way to make it work.
“Olivier was a very complicated, moody and insecure person. Plus, he was a lot older,” noted Galloway.
Plowright admitted it took patience.
“I loved him so much I would have died for him, but there were times when I didn’t know how to live with him,” she said. “You have to work at it. You have to be very grown-up.”