Although she was primarily a theater actor, Vivien Leigh is best known as one of the greatest stars of Hollywood's golden era. Yet her personal life was anything but golden, as Lyndsy Spence, an English author and devoted fan, makes tragically clear in Where Madness Lies, a passionate biography that's unafraid to document the personal traumas along with the professional triumphs of Leigh's short life. (She died in 1967 at 53.)
Spence opens this work--which, fittingly, reads more like a Hollywood melodrama than a traditional biography--in 1953, well into Leigh's mutually unfaithful marriage to Laurence Olivier. In that year, Leigh was diagnosed with manic depression, had the first of many breakdowns, and endured several courses of electroconvulsive therapy, which a heartbroken Olivier maintained "had erased the best parts of her."
Events continued their downward turn after that, all of which Spence documents in a gripping narrative. She spares no detail, from the time Leigh was convinced that a wing of the plane she flew on was on fire and was "forcibly sedated with sleeping pills" to the time in 1958 when an Italian hotel asked her to leave, and when she refused and "the police came to remove her, she bit two fingers of one of them." Spence's storytelling approach, with its frequent flashbacks to Leigh's early life and career, is occasionally jarring. The overall result, however, is a sympathetic work that will undoubtedly appeal to scholars of cinema history. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer