Vivien Leigh Trivia
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50 free Vivien Leigh trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Vivien Leigh trivia quiz covers the two-time Best Actress winner from her birth in British India to the night the West End dimmed its lights for her. The easy questions ask which two roles won her Oscars, who her famous second husband was, where she was born, and which Marlon Brando film she made in 1951. Then it moves into the story everyone half-knows: the agent brother who introduced her on the burning Atlanta set, the director fired from Gone with the Wind, the actors she befriended and the one she clashed with, the secret Santa Barbara wedding witnessed by Katharine Hepburn. The hard end is for classic Hollywood devotees: her real name, the barrister she married at 19, the play that made her a West End sensation, the Churchill favourite That Hamilton Woman, the Old Vic tour where Olivier said he lost her, the film in Ceylon she was replaced on by Elizabeth Taylor, her Tony for Tovarich, Kenneth Tynan's cruel reviews and his recantation, and the lake where her ashes were scattered. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry on Vivien Leigh and the articles on her major films before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Gone with the Wind, classic Hollywood and Laurence Olivier quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Vivien Leigh won her two Best Actress Oscars for Scarlett O'Hara and which other character?
Blanche DuBois
Blanche DuBois. Both Oscar roles were belles of the American South played by an Englishwoman, and she had already acted this one for months on the London stage before filming it.
Q 02In which city of British India was Vivien Leigh born in 1913?
Darjeeling
Darjeeling. At six she was sent from the Himalayan hill station to a convent boarding school in England, the first of several convents across Europe that educated her.
Q 03What was Vivien Leigh's surname at birth?
Hartley
Hartley. Born Vivian Mary Hartley, she borrowed 'Leigh' from her first husband's middle name, and for the stage the spelling of her first name was changed from Vivian to Vivien.
Q 04Which future actress was Vivien Leigh's convent schoolfriend, to whom she confided her wish to be 'a great actress'?
Maureen O'Sullivan
Maureen O'Sullivan. She reached the screen first, and it was after watching one of her old schoolfriend's films in a London cinema that Leigh told her parents she meant to act.
Q 05Leigh's first husband, whom she married in 1932 aged 19, worked in which profession?
Barrister
Barrister. She left drama school to marry Leigh Holman, found life as a lawyer's hostess dull, and within months had talked him into letting her go back to her training.
Q 06Which 1935 play brought Leigh her first rave reviews and a contract from Alexander Korda?
The Mask of Virtue
The Mask of Virtue. Her triumph had a sting: when the play moved to a bigger theatre her voice proved too small to fill it, and the run soon ended.
Q 07Which young actor played the brutish Stanley Kowalski opposite Leigh in the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando. He and most of the cast were steeped in the American Method, and Leigh, trained in the English classical tradition, had to blend her way of working with theirs.
Q 08Leigh and Olivier began their affair while playing lovers in which 1937 film?
Fire Over England
Fire Over England. He played a daring sailor and she a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, and because both were married to other people the romance had to be hidden until they could wed in 1940.
Q 09Leigh played Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet in a 1937 Old Vic production staged where?
Elsinore, Denmark
Elsinore, Denmark. The company played Hamlet at Kronborg, the castle where Shakespeare set it, and the inexperienced Leigh had set her heart on playing opposite Olivier there.
Q 10Which role in Wuthering Heights did Leigh turn down because she wanted to play Cathy instead?
Isabella
Isabella. Director William Wyler told her she would never get a better part for a first American film; within months she had been cast as Scarlett O'Hara.
Q 11Who, per legend, introduced Vivien Leigh to Gone with the Wind's producer with 'Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara'?
Myron Selznick
Myron Selznick. He was the producer's brother and Leigh's Hollywood agent, and he staged the meeting on the night the film's great fire scene was shot, with the flames lighting her face.
Q 12Which 1964 Bette Davis chiller did Leigh turn down, a part that went to Olivia de Havilland?
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Joan Crawford had fallen ill during the shoot; Leigh declined another Southern mansion, and her old co-star from Gone with the Wind stepped in.
Q 13Which director, fired early in the Gone with the Wind shoot, did Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland secretly consult?
Q 21Which wartime leader loved That Hamilton Woman so much that he called it his favourite film and screened it repeatedly?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill. He is said to have suggested the story himself, and he showed the film to his staff aboard the battleship taking him to meet Roosevelt in 1941.
Q 22In the mid-1940s Leigh was diagnosed with which disease, which eventually killed her in 1967?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis. Doctors found a patch on one lung after a cough she could not shake, and though weeks in hospital seemed to cure it, it flared up at intervals for the rest of her life.
Q 23Leigh suffered a miscarriage after a fall while filming which Shaw adaptation in 1944?
Caesar and Cleopatra
George Cukor
George Cukor. Both actresses slipped away to him at night and at weekends for coaching, while on set Leigh quarrelled again and again with the man who had replaced him.
Q 14Which of Leigh's Gone with the Wind co-stars became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award?
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie McDaniel. She won Best Supporting Actress as Mammy, beating her co-star Olivia de Havilland, yet at the ceremony she was seated at a segregated table apart from the rest of the cast.
Q 15In which city did Gone with the Wind, the film that made Leigh a star, have its world premiere in 1939?
Atlanta
Atlanta. The city where the story is set laid on three days of parades and a costume ball for the stars, less than a year after Leigh, then little known in America, had won the part.
Q 16Where did Leigh and Olivier marry on 31 August 1940, with only their hosts and two witnesses?
San Ysidro Ranch, Santa Barbara
San Ysidro Ranch, Santa Barbara. The actor Ronald Colman, who owned the ranch, arranged the ceremony in secret as soon as the couple's divorces came through.
Q 17Which actress won the lead in Rebecca (1940) after the producer judged Vivien Leigh's screen test lacking in sincerity?
Joan Fontaine
Joan Fontaine. Olivier, cast as the husband, had lobbied for Leigh, but the producer noticed she had shown no interest in the part until her lover was signed.
Q 18Which MGM star was cast opposite Leigh in Waterloo Bridge (1940), though she had wanted Olivier for the part?
Robert Taylor
Robert Taylor. He was then one of the studio's biggest draws, yet Leigh, who grumbled that the part had been written for Olivier, took top billing in what proved a hit.
Q 19Which Shakespeare tragedy did Leigh and Olivier stage on Broadway in 1940, losing most of their savings?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet. New York's critics were hostile, one writing that the handsome pair 'hardly act their parts at all', and Olivier had to go back to film work to cover the losses.
Q 20In That Hamilton Woman (1941), Leigh played Emma Hamilton opposite Olivier as which naval hero?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson. The newlywed Oliviers shot the film quickly and cheaply in 1940, with an eye to stirring American sympathy for a Britain already at war.
Caesar and Cleopatra. Some biographers date her long struggle with manic depression from that loss, though others find signs of the illness years earlier.
Q 24In 1957 Leigh was asked to leave which chamber after rising to protest at the demolition of a London theatre?
The House of Lords
The House of Lords. Seated among the visitors as Lady Olivier, she called out 'My Lords, I wish to protest' against pulling down the St James's Theatre, which was demolished all the same.
Q 25The Oliviers' marriage came under strain on a gruelling 1948 Old Vic tour of which part of the world?
Australasia
Australasia. Six months in Australia and New Zealand left both of them ill, Olivier telling a reporter they were walking corpses, and he later said he 'lost Vivien' in Australia.
Q 26Olivier directed Leigh in the 1949 London premiere of a play by which American dramatist?
Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams. The play was A Streetcar Named Desire; he approved Leigh for the lead himself, and its frankness about sex scandalised parts of the London press and Parliament.
Q 27Which actor played the street performer who takes in Leigh's young pickpocket in St. Martin's Lane (1938)?
Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton. His own company produced the film, in which the busker turns the light-fingered runaway into a performer and is left behind when she becomes a star.
Q 28Which director of the 1951 Streetcar film preferred Jessica Tandy but came to admire Vivien Leigh's grit?
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan. He began by thinking she had only 'a small talent', and ended in awe of an actress who, he said, would have crawled over broken glass to better her performance.
Q 29Besides the Oscar and BAFTA, Leigh's Streetcar performance won her the Volpi Cup at which film festival?
Venice
Venice. The festival honoured her months before the Oscars did, for a part she found so gruelling that she later said it had 'tipped me over into madness'.
Q 30In 1943 Leigh left the London stage to entertain Allied troops in which theatre of war?
North Africa
North Africa. She joined a touring revue, reciting poems and playing scenes from Shakespeare for the troops, and came home with a cough that would not clear.