Previously unpublished image of power couple is curtain-raiser for National Portrait Gallery's exhibition of her life and career
A previously unpublished image of one of the most glamorous couples of British theatre, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, captured at the height of their fame at a charity garden party in 1949, is to go on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The photograph, by the British photo-journalist Larry Burrows, launches a series of events marking the centenary of Leigh's birth and later this month the NPG will open an exhibition tracing her life and career, which will include many other previously unseen images.
Terence Pepper, curator of photographs at the NPG, described Leigh as "one of the most extraordinary British talents and beauties in the film and theatre world of the second half of the 20th century".
In 1949 the couple, who had starred in a sell-out tour of Australia and New Zealand the previous year, were famous across the world. Their friends included the Queen Mother and Churchill, and they were renowned for glamorous house parties at their grand country home, Notley Abbey in Buckinghamshire.
Burrows caught up with them on 31 May, when they appeared at a charity fair at the Roehampton Club in London, in aid of the Actors' Orphanage Fund, of which Olivier was president. In the picture, Leigh is addressing the crowd through a giant megaphone while Olivier waves balls over his head, presumably inviting punters for the coconut shy.
In 1949 Burrows, aged just 23, had just begun working for Life magazine's London bureau. His later assignments included famous images of the war in Vietnam, but he died in 1971 with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos. An award-winning book of his war photographs was published posthumously.
His sunny, jokey image of Leigh and Olivier, apparently without a care in the world, has been presented by his son Russell Burrows and daughter-in-law Barbara Baker Burrows, specially for the Leigh centenary. It will be on display from Friday with two other rare images of the couple, one by Paul Tanqueray in 1942, the other taken by Leigh herself on the set of The School for Scandal in 1949.
Leigh won two Oscars for her performances as Blanche du Bois in the film of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951, and as Scarlett O'Hara in the epic film of Gone With the Wind. Her performance as Nelson's mistress Emma in the 1941 That Hamilton Woman made it Winston Churchill's favourite film.
Her career and her 20-year marriage to Olivier were shadowed by her physical and mental fragility, and she died of tuberculosis in 1967 aged just 53.
Starring Vivien Leigh: A Centenary Celebration will be at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 30 November 2013
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