Vivien Leigh as Aurora, Goddess of Dawn

1 portrait of Vivien Leigh

Angus McBean Photograph. © Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.

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Vivien Leigh as Aurora, Goddess of Dawn

by Angus McBean
vintage bromide print, 1938
5 in. x 3 5/8 in. (128 mm x 93 mm) image size
Purchased, 2008
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax183861

Sitterback to top

  • Vivien Leigh (1913-1967), Actress. Sitter associated with 147 portraits.

Artistback to top

  • Angus McBean (1904-1990), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 283 portraits, Sitter in 79 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Pepper, Terence, Angus McBean Portraits, 2006 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 5 July to 22 October 2006), p. 44 Read entry

    When Leigh was included in the surrealist series she had just finished working with Charles Laughton on the film of St Martin's Lane (1938), in which she played a street urchin. McBean had taken a series of double portraits of the two stars for publicity purposes. The classical allusion was a recurring theme in the surreal series, starting with his portrait of Diana Wynyard in a half-length classical robe in a sandscape with fallen columns. Other actresses portrayed as goddesses included Tamara Geva and Lynn Fontanne. Published as the magazine's frontispiece and captioned 'Beautiful Goddess of Dawn’, McBean’s 'Surrealised Portrait' of Leigh provoked so much interest that the following week the magazine published a full-page portrait of McBean preparing Leigh's Greek goddess plaster gown. The photograph was taken by McBean's assistant John Vickers, who was later to take over the studio at 29B Belgrave Road and became his rival as a West End theatre photographer. 'The clouds are tufts of cotton fastened with wire directly attached to Miss Leigh's dress,' McBean later explained.

  • Various contributors, National Portrait Gallery: A Portrait of Britain, 2014, p. 210 Read entry

    Vivian Hartley was born in Darjeeling, India, into a British military family. Following a convent school education in England and training at RADA, Vivien Leigh (her chosen stage name), became an overnight sensation in the play The Mask of Virtue (1935). Leigh’s most famous performance, as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939) brought her worldwide recognition and the first of two Academy Awards. She and Laurence Olivier, whom she married in 1940, were one of the most celebrated couples of the era on stage and screen.

    The surrealist portraits of Angus McBean (1904–90) appeared in the Sketch throughout 1938 with the painter Roy Hobdell closely collaborating to create trompe-l’oeil and other effects.

    McBean’s first portraits of Leigh were taken to publicise her early stage role starring opposite Ivor Novello in The Happy Hypocrite (1936). These images established him as a photographer and initiated an association with Leigh that lasted for thirty years. His photographs of Leigh a decade later as Blanche DuBois in the stage production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire were considered some of his finest theatrical portraits. When she died from tuberculosis on 7 July 1967, aged just fifty-three, the press lamented the loss of the ‘greatest beauty of all time’.

Events of 1938back to top

Current affairs

Britain pursues its policy of appeasement. At the Munich Agreement, Britain, France and Italy agreed to allow Hitler to seize the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. The agreement was seen at the time as a triumph for peace, with Neville Chamberlain returning home brandishing the paper agreement and saying 'peace for our time.' Within six months Germany had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Art and science

Graham Greene publishes Brighton Rock. The novel follows the descent of Pinky, a teenage gang leader in Brighton's criminal underworld. The book examines the criminal mind and explores the themes of morality and sin - recurrent concerns for the Roman Catholic Author.
Glasgow hosts the Empire Exhibition; an £11 million celebration of the British Empire visited by 13 million people.

International

In its pursuit of 'Lebensraum' (living space), Germany annexes Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia with little opposition from the League of Nations. At home, the Nazis continued their escalating persecution of the Jews with 'Kristallnacht' (the Night of Broken Glass), attacking Jewish homes, shops, businesses and synagogues, and taking Jewish men to concentration camps.

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