The life story of Vivien Thomas, an African American surgical technician who developed the first procedure used to perform open-heart surgery on children.

Vivien Leigh is best known as the former Mrs. Laurence Olivier; the beautiful but willful Scarlett O'Hara; and the fading southern belle with a tenuous grip on reality, Blanche Du Bois. In life and on the screen, these were her public roles. Walker's excellent biography fills the gaps, giving insights into her private life-into what it must have been like to be Vivien Leigh. Walker (author of Garbo: A Portrait, CH, Mar '81; Dietrich, 1984; and Bette Davis: A Celebration, 1986) is a careful researcher who managed to win the confidence of the right people. His interview subjects include Vivien Leigh's only daughter, Suzanne Farrington; her first agent, John Glidden; and her last husband, Jack Merivale. Vivien is personal without being excessively gossipy, and informative without being pedantic. Walker's book should delight film-goers, theater-goers, and readers curious about prominent people. Leigh's achievements were many, but her personality had its darker side; even her 20 years as half of Britain's reigning theatrical couple ``the Oliviers'' took its toll on her physical and mental health. Amply supplied with photographs of the actress at all stages of her life, Vivien is an engaging book about an engaging figure. Undergraduates and general readers.- J.L. Cohen, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm" Margaret Mitchell opened Gone with the Wind with this description of Scarlett O'Hara, but her words can hardly be applied to Vivien Leigh, the British actress who gave an unforgettable performance as the Southern belle. Leigh possessed a beauty that men seldom failed to recognize and a charm that caught many, but her life was far from being all beauty and charm. This biography of the beautiful and tortured actress, from her birth and childhood in exotic India to her premature death in 1967, gives special attention to her development and career as a stage and film actress (which culminated in one Tony award and two Oscars). Her ambitious personality and her manic-depressive illness, including the sexual compulsion that haunted her life, her romantic and tragic marriage to Laurence Olivier, and her performances in, for instance, Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire, are all detailed.

THE STORY: Vivien Leigh is holding her last press conference in a theatre, taking questions from members of the press. We learn her thoughts on the five stages of an actress' professional life as well as the specifics of her own career, including a

"Reframing Vivien Leigh takes a fresh new look at one of the twentieth century's most iconic stars. Focussing on Vivien Leigh as a distinctly archival subject, the book draws upon original oral history work with curators, archivists and fan collectives and extensive research within a network of official and unofficial archives around the world to produce alternative stories about her place within film history. The study examines an intriguing variety of historical correspondence, costume, scripts, photography, props and memorabilia in order to reframe the dominant narratives that have surrounded her life and career. Whilst Leigh's glamour, collaborations with Laurence Olivier and mental health form important coordinates for any study of the star, the book foregrounds a range of alternative contexts which foreground her creative agency, examining her off-screen labor in areas such as theatrical training, adaptation, war work, producing, protesting and interactions with her fan base"--

A London shop girl was blessed and cursed by the fairies at her Christening with foolish self-confidence, proper self-respect, credulity, trustfulness, vanity and love of approbation and so on just balancing each other out, as they often did. She needed all those gifts and more as she wound her way through one paying post after another, defending her honor and virtue at every stop, until finally she found her way into the arms of one who will cherish her.