“If we loved each other only with our bodies I suppose it would be alright. I love you with much more than that. I love you with, oh everything somehow, with a special kind of soul.”
Another equally passionate letter reads: “I am sitting naked with just my parts wrapped in your panties. My longing for you is so intense,” later adding: “I’m loving and adoring and want you so.”
In an undated letter written at around the same time, Olivier called Leigh his “jewelkin”, writing: “You are in my thoughts and weighing so heavily in my heart all the time. I am only existing until I see you again and only just managing to do that.”
In 1939, Leigh landed the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, but the letters between the pair reveal that the actress was very unhappy as she struggled with the role, and both she and Olivier believed that the film would be a failure.
Offering advice to his stricken lover, Olivier wrote: “You have got to be damn smart to make a success of your career in pictures which is ESSENTIAL for your self-respect … I am afraid you may become just boring. Never to me … But to yourself and because of that to others.”
Once their affair became an open secret in Hollywood, the pair were forced to keep their relationship out of the public eye until their first marriages were legally over.“I have come to the conclusion you’re very naughty,” reads one letter sent by Olivier in 1939. “We are a popular scandal, or rather a public one. Therefore it is only reasonably good taste to be as unobtrusive as possible. Can you dance and be gay and carry on like the gay happy hypocrite days? No my love you cannot. Why because of your fame, tripled with our situation – quadrupled with the fame there off .”
Olivier and Leigh finally tied the knot in 1940 and letters sent by Leigh in the 1950s reveal the passion between the two remained very much alive a decade into the marriage.
“Oh sweet Baba. If we were together I expect this would seem quite exciting, but then that applies to everything in life,” Leigh wrote to her husband on 1 August 1950 while on a plane. A later letter reads: “Whenever you think of me my Larry-boy you will know I am with you adoringly Vivien.”
However, by the end of the decade their romance was no more. Leigh suffered from bipolar disorder and had a series of mental breakdowns that put an increasing strain on their relationship and the couple divorced in 1960.
Yet despite Olivier remarrying a year later, to the actor Joan Plowright, the pair still wrote to each other on occasion.
In the early 1960s, Olivier wrote that he hoped Leigh would be able to “find happiness” now they were free of each other. “I want to say thank you for understanding it all for my sake,” reads Oliver’s letter addressing their divorce. “You did nobly and bravely and beautifully and I am very oh so sorry, very sorry, that it must have been much hell for you.”
However, on the wish of happily remarried Olivier, the pair barely saw each other again. In May 1967, five weeks before her death from recurring tuberculosis, Olivier wrote his final letter to Leigh, signed simply: “Sincerest love darling, your Larry.”
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