I am a big fan of Viviene Leigh so I was very excited to get the chance to read this book. The story is heartbreaking as you learn about Vivian’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder and how they navigated around it. I was sad when the book ended wanting more.


TRULY, MADLY is the biography of a marriage, a love affair that still captivates millions, even decades after both actors' deaths. Vivien and Larry were two of the first truly global celebrities – their fame fueled by the explosive growth of tabloids and television, which helped and hurt them in equal measure. They seemed to have it all and yet, in their own minds, they were doomed, blighted by her long-undiagnosed mental-illness, which transformed their relationship from the stuff of dreams into a living nightmare.

This was so interesting! I’ve always been fascinated by Vivian Leigh since watching Gone With the Wind in high school. This was an inside look to her life in a way I’d never read before. Many thanks to the publisher and netgalley for this copy for review

Stunningly written, this engaging book chronicles the rise and ultimate downfall of one of the greatest romances of the 21st century. One of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

I always tend to side-eye stories with adultery at the center, but I also really like old Hollywood stories, so I gave this a try. It's a quick read, although there is a large cast of supporting characters in the Oliviers' lives. As with all biographers, the author chooses which accounts to believe and which others to reject, which will put the book in opposition to some other accounts. The leads don't always come off as entirely likeable, but the level of work they put into their acting is remarkable, especially with the challenges of trauma and mental illness. It would be great to read this after re-watching some of their best films.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

I had to DNF this one. It was hard for me to admit because I have always been a Vivien Leigh fan, but I couldn’t get through this book. It’s unfortunate but it wasn’t for me.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I received this as an eGalley from NetGalley.

Welp I enjoyed learning about both Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier but man did this book bum me out in the end. Poor Vivien dealing with such intense mental illness struggles without the modern combination(s) of therapy and medication.

Thank you to Grand Central Publishing and to NetGalley for and ARC copy of this book.

I have been a Vivien Leigh fan since seeing her when I was a kid in Gone With The Wind. Although I had also seen Laurence Olivier in several films I knew little about his personal life. This book was really well written, and I was able to learn so much about both of them and their marriage I did find that at certain points in this book it got a little slow, over all I really liked it. I would definitely recommend this book to fans of old Hollywood, or fans of Laurence Olivier or Vivien Leigh

"Truly, Madly" is, as the introduction describes, a biography of a relationship. After a rapid introduction to both main figures, author Galloway's book traces the initiation and evolution of the famous Olivier-Leigh relationship.

What's good: The author is using here newly released materials and psychological insights to delve into the story of the two actors. In particular, the author speaks with compassion about Leigh's troubles with bipolar disorder and the inabilities of contemporary medicine to adequately treat her.

What's iffier: I think the author could push the psychological insights about Leigh and Olivier further, vs. sparing insertion of expert comments. I think there's a story here about codependency, not just bipolar. (Especially with Olivier, whose familial history in this area is mentioned more than once.)

With gratitude to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advance e copy of this book. An account of the long, tumultuous love affair/marriage between Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Miss Leigh obviously suffered from mental illness, and today would have been appropriately treated. During her lifetime, her outbursts/spells were treated as the actions of a diva, the result of exhaustion and/or alcohol consumption, and possibly hereditary. Although her husband, Sir Olivier, has often been betrayed as a victim to her illness, he carried his own emotional baggage that created a person that, in this telling, is not always as likeable as pop culture lore would have us believe.

"Truly, Madly" by Stephen Galloway focuses on the relationship between Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, two stars at the height of their fame when they were together, but were dealt some tragic challenges along the way. Fans of the You Must Remember This podcast will eat this book up, providing a high level of research and deep insight into Hollywood of the mid-20th Century. This is high Hollywood lore, and I devoured it!

Thank you to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing an ARC.

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were an iconic couple in the acting industry, with their combined talent and looks. But the turbulent thread of mental illness ran through their intense romance, ultimately tearing them apart.

I only vaguely know both these figures, Leigh better than Olivier because of Gone With the Wind. However, I have always been fascinated by old Hollywood romances because of how turbulent they are, and I was excited for this one.

The author has a pleasant narrative voice - he is respectful of both parties, which I appreciated considering how easy it could be to simply dismiss them as another pair of high-strung artistes. He interviewed many people close to the couple, so he is able to give us an inside view in the relationship. I was also really interested in how the book was a biography of a relationship and not merely the two people in it, and the damage that mental illness did to it.

However, I did find the pacing slowed at times, and my attention lagged. Though the author does a good job of translating the stage to the page, everything does not come across so I don't know that I truly felt the force of the couple's talent.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: none
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

This is an accessible, intimate-feeling biography that is primarily focused on the passionate, tumultuous relationship between Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh: something I was vaguely aware of, including Leigh’s struggles with her mental health, but hadn’t really dug into. With people whose lives seem close enough that one can almost remember them (Olivier died in 1989 I think) there’s always a delicate balance between reasonable curiosity and … well .. prurience. Like, I remember when several of their love letters were made public five or something years ago and I was initially fascinating because there’s nothing as revealing as love letters. And then uncomfortable because there’s nothing as revealing as love letters. And I do know there’s a degree to which exchange between famous people feel like public property—as their lives, loves and mental health feel like public property—but I don’t quite see how we culturally benefit for knowing what Laurence Olivier was doing with Vivian Leigh’s pants, y’know?

More selfishly—while I am not a Hollywood legend—I would be mortified EVEN IN DEATH if my smutty ramblings were in any way made accessible to anyone beyond their recipient. I mean, I once sent Mary something mildly suggestive (meant to for my partner, not for my assistant) and had to be excavated from the centre of the earth, where I’d gone to bury myself forever.

Anyway, despite my own battles with squeamishness versus inquisitiveness—and while it’s very much not my place to judge—I found this biography pretty tasteful. Drawing a range of autobiographies, biographies, interviews and what appear to be direct conversations the author had with some of the involved parties (though not, of course, the dead ones) it has a chattiness to it that, surprisingly, manages to keep it on the right side of gossipy. Which is to say, the book is a tapestry of overlapping accounts and stories from which something like a coherent picture emerges. And this, in turn, stops it from straying into either speculation, side-taking, or scandal-seeking. For example, a device it uses fairly often, especially when relating the latter part of Leigh’s life, when she was struggling with her illness a lot, is offering us multiple versions of the same events, told by different parties. This means the reader never forgets that what they’re reading is a constructed narrative and mostly hearsay: that the truth, whatever that means, lies with the participants, and their inner lives (for all that the rest of their lives was conducted publicly) are not ours to access.

It's also, for better or worse (mostly for the better, but I’ll come back to this) a carefully neutral book. Leigh’s illness—misunderstood and untreated as it was—naturally drove her to some extremes of behaviour, including various affairs and sexual encounters (though obviously Olivier was equally unfaithful). Galloway reports on these incidents but neither dwells nor judges: thus, offering an important counter-narrative to all the “Vivian Leigh was a nymphomaniac” type hot takes. Similarly, Galloway mostly avoids armchair diagnoses, relying instead on the context offered by both modern and contemporaneous accounts of bipolar depression. For the most part, I found it a nuanced, compassionate portrait of Leigh, one that allowed her complexity and her humanity to shine through, despite the harsh toll her illness took on her.

Sorry, I realise I haven’t said much about how it handles Olivier. To be honest, he comes across like an utter weirdo, which is very much on Olivier, not on Galloway. But, again, I think Galloway offers the same compassion to Olivier that he does to Leigh, allowing space within the text recognise the genuine anguish he must have suffered in being married to someone with an undiagnosed and destructive mental health condition, while ensuring that Vivian Leigh’s story remains her own, for all her life and Olivier’s were entwined. After all, Laurence Olivier was pretty keen on his own account to make the tragedy of Vivian Leigh the tragedy of Laurence Olivier.

Where the neutrality, I think, slightly damaged the book for me, and this is very much a personal thing, is that there was very little challenge to the prevailing narrative that Laurence Olivier was a genius and Vivian Leigh was beautiful, but her talent was limited. This is simply because while it’s easy enough to find testimony that Olivier was a genius—including from Olivier himself—and equally straightforward to find people willing to share times Vivian Leigh was erratic on set for, some reason, critical admiration for Leigh of which there was quite a bit, for both her film and stage work (let’s not forget she won two academy awards and a BAFTA) seems, somehow, less real when applied to her—when it’s just sort of taken for granted with Olivier. For example, the book consistently quotes Kenneth Tynan (declaring him London’s “sharpest and shrewdest critic”) who seems to have made it his life’s work to criticise Leigh while exalting her husband. This, coupled with his eagerness to share salacious stories about the time she apparently hit on him (but he couldn’t go through with it because the thought of cucking Laurence Oliver was JUST TOO PAINFUL, wow what a guy) just makes him come across as an utter arse—with his negative critical hardon (as well as his negative literal hardon) for Leigh surely rooted in either misogyny or a messed up boycrush on Olivier rather than any sort of sharpness or shrewdness.

Basically, I think where I’m going with this is that, while I appreciated Truly Madly’s focus on Leigh’s illness as way of understanding her behaviour, it sometimes ran the danger of being the only lens through which the book wanted to examine her. This had the, I think, inadvertent result of occasionally diminishing her achievements, with commentary from people like Tynan allowed to run roughshod through the narrative, and flattening out some aspects of her social and professional context—especially because mental illness intersects almost inextricably with misogyny when it comes to the lives of famous women, and famous beautiful women even more so.

What does come through above all else though, is the intensity of the love between Leigh and Olivier. God knows what she saw in him, but clearly they saw something in each other, and the something was powerful enough to shape not who they were and would become but their entire lives. A small misstep, for me, in the part of the book was to conclude its account of this complex, doomed, very real love affair by comparing passion to … uh … bipolar depression.

“Passion sears, it scalds, it convulses, it disrupts. It creates and destroys in equal measure. At times it can seem like a mental illness, not all that different from the “mixed state” of bipolar disorder that fuses two apparent opposes, mania and depression, into a third hallucinatory condition, unlike anything most of us have ever known.”

I really don’t think I need to unpick why this is a terrible analogy, especially in the context of a book at least partially about a woman who suffered deeply from the illness in question. Hard no.

To end on a happier note, let me just mention that Patrick Stewart (who apparently worked with Leigh on a couple of occasions) is one of the actors interviewed for the book. And, true to form, he just comes across as the loveliest? His recollections of Leigh, while limited, are some of the kindest and most illuminating in the book. He has a few personal stories to tell, but steers clear of gossip, acknowledges the rumours surrounding her while also not contributing to them, leaves space for those who have been hurt by her behaviour alongside finding positive things to say himself. Most notably, however, he speaks about her not as a victim, a scandal, or tragedy or an enigma. He speaks about her as an actor:

“She was always very, very, nice to me […] but she wasn’t always nice to others […] There were rumours about breakdowns and health and stuff, but she was doing eight shows a week for fifteen months, playing leading roles, and she never missed an entrance or a performance.”

New to-do list for self:
1. Ensure every smutty thing I have ever sent to anyone will never end up in the V&A
2. Make Patrick Stewart immortal
3. Get to know Patrick Stewart
4. Have Patrick Stewart give interviews about me after I’m dead

What a heartbreaking story of the marriage of Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Vivien suffered from what would come to be known as manic depression, but in the mid 20th century little was known of the disorder or of ways to help those who suffered from it. Olivier and Leigh struggled to maintain flourishing acting careers both on screen and stage, as well as their marriage amidst the storm of her mental illness. Sadly, it destroyed their marriage, but not her love for him, nor seemingly his for her, even at the end of his life. This "biography of a marriage" was extremely well written and documented. I highly recommend it.

I received a review copy from #netgalley and the publisher, but the opinions expressed are my own.

Truly, Madly is a comprehensive, very readable, painful story of the love, marriage and the crumbling of the relationship between "the" celebrity couple of the forties and fifties, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. I like that Galloway successfully gives us the complexity of each of his subjects personalities. We all know that Leigh suffered from severe mental illness and she became exceedingly hard to be around. We know that even now, mental illness is stigmatized and misunderstood as willfully problematic behavior. Larry Olivier certainly tried to be there for her, but he is not what I would call the husband of the year in his role in their relationship.

Galloway captures who Leigh was before her illness became severe, how it developed and manifested itself, how she and the people around her reacted to it and who she was and all she accomplished knowing she not only had bipolar disorder but tuberculosis, which ultimately killed her. I never would have guessed that she was brilliant, well read and knew several languages, that she was born in India and sent off to a Catholic boarding school in Britain at age six. How she got into acting. I personally forgot how beautiful she was. There are no pictures in the Netgalley version I read but the Internet obliges with plenty of material.

Olivier, too was a complicated man, son of an authoritarian cleric, insecure and competitive, yet well aware of his powerful gift, mercurial and generous. Much alcohol was drunk, many affairs were had. To be together each of them deserted their first born and only children and lived in sin at a time when this was beyond scandalous. In times of great political turmoil, they were disinterested in the details, though did what they could for the war effort. I do not find it unkind that Olivier could not withstand being married to Leigh any longer after years of intense, screaming rage at one another. Even when this is due to illness, it is altruistic and naive to suggest that it is bearable when so much rage is directed at you. However, however however.....

That each of them were interesting, worthy of compassion, talented-- one beyond talented, and more is without question. But. I don't like either of them. Despite the very nicely done, multi-dimensional portraits Galloway gives me in a very well written and incredibly well researched manner, these two were narcissistic, hedonistic, extravagant and never found deep values outside of their narrow theater/film world. This shallowness shines through Galloway's best efforts. This biography is neither a harsh picture of them, nor a white washed picture of them, but after reading their best and their worst, I'm not impressed and I have a deep tolerance for some of their worst behavior. I just don't find that their best ever became meaningful outside of their careers. That's a lot. I just want people to be better, deeper, more outwardly caring than they were. I like to read about people whose values I can admire, who took their talents and successes and used them in part to give back at least prior to becoming too ill to be that person.

Definitely read this book if you are interested in this relationship, their lives and careers. It will be the best you've read about Olivier and Leigh and you can assure yourself it as real a version of their story as you can find.

This painstakingly researched biography of combustive, lusty, explosive relationship and marriage between actors extraordinaire Sir Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh is thorough to the point of exhaustion. A little more humor would have gone a long way, though the two subjects were admittedly often humorless.

I love Vivian Leigh, the actress. But now, after reading Truly, Madly, I admire her courage in going all out for her dreams despite serious mental health issues.

Vivian and Laurence Olivier had a real love story—not just a Hollywood romance. And, unfortunately, not all real-life stories have a happy ending. However, I did learn a lot about the acting profession in the twentieth century as well as about the actors themselves.

Truly, Madly is an intriguing true-life tale of passion, drive, and moviemaking. 4 stars!

Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Review featured at www.books-n-kisses.com

4.5 Hearts What a great book for any fan of Hollywood’s “it” couple. I have been a fan of Vivien Leigh’s since first seeing her in Gone With The Wind and probably that is where most fans will say they know her from. Laurence Olivier is best known for his stage performances and movies like Wuthering Heights and Spartacus.

Having started as an affair while both married they eventually married each other, suffered through miscarriages, time apart for filming and what would later be diagnosed as bi-polar disorder that was too new to be named but Leigh suffered from. Their relationship was one of romance, passion and tumultuous times.

The book is very thorough and very well researched. You can tell the author wrote from a love of the actors. I enjoyed so much of this book. Sometimes it was a bit wordy and a bit like a lecture but the information is worth the read.

Disclaimer:
I received a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This biography about Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier is a true gem for anyone who is a huge fan of the actors. If you are not super into movies or the stage, and you are just a light fan of Leigh from her time in Gone With the Wind, this book might be too in-depth.

I probably fell into the latter category, so it was a lot to get through for me. It included name-dropping of practically every heavy-duty player in movies or British theater throughout the 20th century. It was interesting to see how Leigh's mental illness presented itself as the time went by. They truly had a deep love story which is rare!

Overall it is well-researched and very interesting, especially if, as mentioned, you are a super-fan.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book.

I picked this book up because I didn’t know much about the two actors and was anticipating a gossipy, name-dropping portrait of a marriage and a glamorous time in Hollywood. While it is that, this book is mostly a deeply sad look at how profound, untreated mental illness can ruin the lives of even the most sparkling of people. Galloway is very compassionate in his portrait of Vivien.

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were giants as actors. Ms. Leigh may be best known for playing Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, while Olivier was a renowned Shakespearean thespian. As can often be the case, this external glitter and glory did not fully reflect the actual lives of these two.

This well-researched book, sometimes gossipy in tone, tells the story of the cataclysmic meeting and relationship of these two stars. Just like a meteor (to keep an analogy going), these two were on a collision course.

What were the highs and lows for these two? How did they meet, come together and live a life together? Why did their relationship implode and what happened to each in light of this? Read this title to find out.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this title. All opinions are my own.