Vivien Leigh Quotes

I'm not a film star; I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.

I've been a godmother loads of times, but being a grandmother is better than anything.

I loved fencing and dancing and elocution.

My birth sign is Scorpio and they eat themselves up and burn themselves out. I swing between happiness and misery. I am part prude and part nonconformist. I say what I think and I don't pretend and I am prepared to accept the consequences of my actions.

Most of us have compromised with life. Those who fight for what they want will always thrill us.

People who are very beautiful make their own laws.

Life is too short to work so hard.

I cannot let well enough alone. I get restless. I have to be doing different things. I am a very impatient person and headstrong. If I've made up my mind to do something, I can't be persuaded out of it.

But I remember the morning after The Mask of Virtue-which is the first play I did at the West End-that some critics saw fit to be as foolish as to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say, because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn't able to carry. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said-for those first notices. I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well, and have never forgiven him.

Scarlett: You should die of shame to leave me here alone and helpless. Rhett: You helpless? (laughs) Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you.

Sometimes I dread the truth of the lines I say. But the dread must never show.

When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people.

It's much easier to make people cry than to laugh.

I've always been mad about cats.

In Britain, an attractive woman is somehow suspect. If there is talent as well, it is overshadowed. Beauty and brains just can't be entertained; someone has been too extravagant. This does not happen in America or on the Continent, for the looks of a woman are considered a positive advertisement for her gifts and don't detract from them.

My husband, who's the greatest actor in the world, can do anything. Look at what he did in The Critic and Oedipus. In every role he gets-he did this in Richard the Third-there's nothing he can't do, nothing. Just nothing.

Things are simple when you're going to die.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.

Having lost Rhett, she can always return to the land - to Tara, to soak up its strength. . . . Tara! . . . Home. I'll go home, and I'll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow is another day!

I realize that the memories I cherish most are not the first night successes, but of simple, everyday things: walking through our garden in the country after rain; sitting outside a cafe in Provence, drinking the vin de pays; staying at a little hotel in an English market town with Larry, in the early days after our marriage, when he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, and I was touring Scotland, so that we had to make long treks to spend weekends together.

Who could quarrel with Clark Gable? We got on well. Whenever anyone on the set was tired or depressed, it was Gable who cheered that person up. Then the newspapers began printing the story that Gable and I were not getting on. This was so ridiculous it served only as a joke. From the time on the standard greeting between Clark and myself became, 'How are you not getting on today?'

I think Edith Evans is the most marvelous actress in the world and she can look beautiful. People who aren't beautiful can look beautiful. She can look as beautiful as Diana Cooper, who was the most beautiful woman in the world.

You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me.

I think any classical training in the theatre is of enormous value.

People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap.

Dear Lord, I'm so grateful I'm still loved.

Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.

I cannot let well enough alone. I get restless. I have to be doing different things.

I need something truly beautiful to look at in hotel rooms.

Scarlett tells Mammy: "I'm too young to be a widow." She weeps to her mother: "My life is over. Nothing will ever happen to me anymore." Her mother comforts her: "It's only natural to want to look young and be young when you are young."

A lucky thing Eva Peron was. She died at 32. I'm already 45.

I will not be ignored.

My friends, when I was young, were always older than I was, and I've always liked them. And I love old men and old ladies, really. But I've known more elderly men, like Max Beerbohm, like Beranard Berenson, like Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill-I'd put him first, anyway-what they say is so wise and so good. They know what they're talking about.

I'm not young. What's wrong with that?

My parents were French and Irish and our family even has Spanish blood-and I do so love the United States and consider myself part American.

I don't know what that Method is. Acting is life, to me, and should be.

I always know my lines.

I think acting is an important profession, because acting can give you pleasure and can teach you at the same time, and that is a good thing.

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.

Every single night I'm nervous. You never know how the audience is going to react.

You can't act on an empty stomach, because you're breathing's all wrong.

Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn't going to be any war. . . . If either of you boys says 'war' just once again, I'll go in the house and slam the door.

I am going to be a great actress.

On the road, they join the bedraggled remnants of a column of exhausted Confederate soldiers evacuating burning Atlanta. Rhett makes her take note of the scene: "Take a good look, my dear. It's a historic moment. You can tell your grandchildren how you watched the Old South disappear one night."

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.

Scarlett, from the ashes of the war-ravaged land at Tara, remembering what she was taught by her father in happier times: "As God is my witness, as God is my witness, they're not going to lick me! I'm going to live through this, and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again - no, nor any of my folks! If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill! As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."

I'm a Scorpio, and Scorpios eat themselves out and burn themselves up like me.

My first husband and I are still good friends and there is no earthly reason why I should not see him. Larry and I are very much in love.

Tired of all her efforts at Tara, Scarlett wishes to escape too: "I do want to escape too! I'm so very tired of it all!. . . The South is dead, it's dead, the Yankees and the carpetbaggers have got it and there's nothing left for us."