Tea at Trianon: Vivien Leigh: Life on Screen

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Vivien Leigh: Life on Screen

From The Guardian:

Three years later, she would up her game once more by playing Blanche DuBois in Elia Kazan's version of A Streetcar Named Desire. It is simply one of the greatest pieces of acting in any American film; no Oscar was ever more deserved. Leigh had lived to unite in one career the acting styles of two distinct worlds – moving from dinner-jacketed Rex Harrison suavely proffering his cigarette-case all the way to Marlon Brando bellowing in a ripped T-shirt. She had passed from urbane theatricality to passion and "the authentic". (Olivier would have to wait years before following her by playing Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer.) There can hardly have been two such different southern belles as Leigh's two Oscar-winning performances as Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche DuBois; not least in the fact that, as Leigh herself pointed out, where one survives, the other goes under. With Blanche, Leigh finds a space for insecurity, for her elusive sense of failure. She seemed to be putting her disintegration on screen; Leigh is felt to suffer as Blanche suffers. To play with her persona, with her talent, was a high‑risk activity but also a sign of things to come. (Read more.)