Before there was Brangelina (or even celebrity portmanteaus), we had Vivien and Laurence, the English stars with multiple Oscars, whose headline-generating love affair broke up two marriages. Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century is Stephen Galloway's compassionate, intrepid inquiry into the 20-year marriage of Leigh (1913-1967) and Olivier (1907-1989) and the "dark currents" that were its undoing.
Hollywood producer David O. Selznick may have been the actors' professional nemesis, but Leigh's bipolar disorder was their downfall. Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind) and Olivier (Maxim de Winter in Rebecca) have been the subjects of multiple biographies, and Truly, Madly features well-chosen quotes from such titles. But Galloway seizes a fresh approach. In his acknowledgments, he writes that, given the medical community's strides in understanding mental illness since Leigh's day, "I wanted to apply that to the past and ask: How different does a relationship look with new information?" Galloway's readers can affirm that it looks both more interesting and more tragic.
Galloway (Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker) re-creates scenes of Leigh's erratic behavior and offers firsthand interpretations from present-day experts in the mental health field. Readers of Truly, Madly will find themselves as beguiled by the love story at its center as they will be heartbroken over the thought that, had Leigh been alive when lithium was in commercial use and there was less stigma around mental illness, her emotional flights could have been reserved for the stage and screen. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer