What prompted Vivien Leigh’s dark journey into madness?

‘Vivien was barking mad from the word go,’ Laurence Olivier reflected in later life, and Lyndsy Spence’s biography would fully concur with the summing-up. At best, the actress was ‘suspended in a dream world’, unable to separate herself from the classic characters she played – Scarlett O’Hara, with her dark hair and flashing eyes, or Blanche DuBois (‘she is a tragic figure and I understand her’). At her worst, Leigh was, in her own words, ‘a thing, an amoeba, at the bottom of the sea’.

Where Madness Lies is a sympathetic description of Leigh’s ‘perturbing nature’; an analysis of her numerous breakdowns, when she was in the grip of manic-depressive cycles – the high spirits and crushing melancholia, when ‘everything inside her brain was white noise’. Spence explores ‘the sensitive subject of mental illness’, using Leigh as an opportunity to look at ‘women’s health and the complexities of the female mind’.

For Leigh was certainly complex – a beauty who could become demonic, drank a lot, got puffy and turned into a total wreck; the double-Academy-Award-winning actress who had a reductive view of her performance; the harridan who drove Olivier to despair – and into the arms of (successively) Dorothy Tutin, Jean Simmons and Claire Bloom – and who then announced ‘I’d rather live a short life with Larry than face a long one without him’. She died alone in 1967, aged 53. Olivier had divorced her seven years previously.

Had India unhinged her? Leigh was born in Darjeeling in 1913, and (as with Jean Rhys in Dominica) something of the tropical heat, humidity and typhoid outbreaks seeped into her temperament. Flower-scented habitats, glass beads, incense, contagious fogs, tarantulas on the lawn – everything seemed in a ‘perfumed haze as heavy as a storm cloud’.