With all the “new” understanding of prioritizing and identifying mental health issues, it was a matter of time before the wave of biopics reached Vivien Leigh. The legendary actress, winner of two Oscars and several successes in film and on stage has a sad story of being one of the first famous people to suffer from Bipolar Disorder, a psychiatric disorder that at the time had not yet been identified or studied as it is today. Her story is about to be told in two films, but the one that is most advanced and was announced today in Hollywood was The Florist, starring none other than Carla Gugino as the British actress.

Currently standing out in the cast of the series The Girls on the Bus, from MAX, Carla has a lot of stage experience on Broadway and, although she is not physically the first actress to imagine herself in the shoes of Vivien Leigh, I consider it one of the happiest options for the challenge.

“I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to excavate a woman as complex, contradictory, and compelling as Vivien. From the moment I read the script, I knew The Florist was a journey I had to pursue,” the actress told Variety.

A psychiatric disorder unknown in Vivien’s time

When she had her first crisis of bipolar disorder, her friends and husband at the time, actor Laurence Olivier, found Viven’s behavior strange, but they only understood that it was something more serious many months and episodes later, when she was clearly experiencing a bigger problem. The issue is that in the late 1940s, there was not yet a modern definition for the condition, at the time called manic depression.

Of the various immediate consequences, in addition to the actress’s suffering with all the characteristics of the disorder such as mood fluctuations, increased libido, and aggressiveness during the period of mania, alternating with periods of depression and apathy, the unexpected changes in behavior earned her fame. difficult, when they were empathetic, and unbalanced when they were critical. If that wasn’t enough, the treatments applied were electroshock sessions to the head, which traumatized her even more. And what’s more: she started experiencing all of this when she was approaching 40, a difficult age for women, and not even for a famous, beautiful, and adored star it was any different.

At the same time that she had no control over her mental health, Vivien was attacked by misogynistic critics who compared her to Olivier, and the actor, after trying for many years to save the relationship, left her for an actress almost 30 years younger. Unsurprisingly, by the time she reached 50, she looked a decade older. She died at just 53.

A Farewell to the Stage directed by John Gielgud and starring Chekhov

About a year before she died, Vivien Leigh was already having difficulty overcoming her emotional “bad reputation”, and, instead of Cinema, she explored her passion for Theater starring in classics by renowned and modern authors. If there was an actor who was even more praised than Olivier, it was his friend, John Gielgud, also a friend of the actress. It was at his invitation, who was also a director, that she shared the stage with the legendary actor in a production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, which took her to Broadway one last time.

Worn out by separation, aging, and, above all, her fragile health, Vivien hesitated in taking on the challenge of starring in the production alongside Sir John Gielgud, who was determined to convince her to accept. According to the actress’s biographer, journalist Alan Dent, she spoke openly with him about her fear of taking on the project while picking flowers in her garden in Sussex. Taking care of the garden and flowers was Vivien’s favorite pastime.

She and Alan spoke at length about the play and her fears about the role. As she argued, everyone said she “was too old to play Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler” and she had doubts about whether she was “mature enough to play Chekhov’s Mrs. Ranevsky.” In fact, she had doubts about whether she was good enough to go on stage. This with two Oscars on the shelf! The answer she heard was that “she was smart enough to look the right age for both of them.”

Ivanov proved to be the last play in which Americans could see Vivien on stage. She would die less than a year later, in London.

The Florist will have Carla Gugino living Vivien’s last years

At 52 years old, Carla Gugino is the exact age of Vivien Leigh at the time she will be portrayed in The Florist. Directed by Nick Sandow, the film will explore for the first time the entire drama of the actress’s life which was a secret until the early 1980s, when Anne Edwards‘ biography first addressed the topic (still known as Manic Depression).

Since then, documentaries and books have explored Vivien’s struggle with the disorder, including Olivier, who passed more than half. of his autobiography detailing his ex-wife’s crises, increasingly violent and distressed by her condition. As The Florist will show, emotional and physical fragility took a toll on Vivien’s health, but she still prepared to perform a challenging play, achieving praise and recognition on stage, a year before she died.

The rest of the cast has not yet been announced, but screenwriter Jayce Bartok worked on the script using Vivien’s love letters from that period as a basis. Although she was involved with the actor Jack Merrivale, and still presented herself as Lady Olivier (even though she was already divorced), while preparing for the play on Broadway, Vivien would have met and had a relationship with the florist and war veteran, Joseph Penn, who met her making a delivery. Although from different worlds, it would have been a meeting of souls. “I was excited to take these two discordant existences and make them touch, and see what that says about things like love, art, mental illness, and celebrity,” the screenwriter told Variety.

In the film, we see how while Vivien attends a local psychiatric center to pursue electroconvulsive therapy, she and Joseph “become sources of truth, beauty, and love for each other.”

It will certainly be a film with great doses of emotion. And a great challenge for Carla Gugino.

In time: Natalie Dormer‘s project about the actress, called Vivling, which had been in development since 2015, now has the script ready and is also circulating between studios. We may have large doses of Vivien Leigh in 2025. It’s about time!

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