*

The Play | Performances |  Performance News  |  Detailed Production Info

  

Watch Video of The Last Press Conference
	Windows Media High | Low	Windows Media High

Add yourself to our mailing list
 

The play begins as Leigh herself sweeps onto the stage for her last press conference – still the glamorous movie star and still talking in Scarlett O'Hara's voice. But it's an illusion. Long past Scarlett's prime, no longer the Georgia peach, she is the thorny English rose who orchestrated her career and romance with Sir Laurence Olivier like Grant took Richmond, no matter the cost.

Driven by hidden demons, Leigh had three defining roles---Scarlett O'Hara from "Gone With the Wind," Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire." and Lady O, the wife of Olivier---and was tortured by them. "I can't be still," she said, "a monster may come." She drifts between past and present, the past always present, in an attempt to define herself this one last time, exposing Viv, the world's darling, desperate for truth and stripped to the bone¹.

Vivien Leigh, The Last Press Conference is the story of a woman, blessed with all the Gods could bestow, at war with the devil: a monster called manic depression. Brave and beautiful, a stage actress who owned the title role in the most popular motion picture ever made. An English rose who garnered two Academy Awards for her portrayal of Southern heroines.

Vivien Leigh was Tinkerbell and Lady Macbeth. A modern legend who is remembered with love and admiration. For the bounty of her legacy eclipses the horrors of the madness that caused her such shame. When she succumbed to tuberculosis at age fifty-four, she had been preparing for Edward Albee’s play "A Delicate Balance"…the title of which seems her most fitting epitaph.

¹ Selected quotes by Karen Gottlieb, Vivien playbill