The World of Cinema

This story... can be told by only one daughter: Vivien Leigh's daughter, Suzanne Holman... It draws a truthful portrait of her famous mother's personality!...

"You must meet Suzanne Holman" — this phrase pursues me until at many moments I grow weary of it; and the speaker usually adds: "She is Vivien Leigh's only daughter." I will not mention the looks of wonder that follow me wherever I turn my face — not admiration for my own person, but for my being Vivien Leigh's daughter, and for my not resembling her in anything.

I cannot bring together the memories that passed through my childhood with the woman I loved and took as the ideal figure I wished one day to become. I always felt that my mother was out of the ordinary, and I remember how my nurse would carry me in her arms, in my white organdy dress, and pass with me through the hall where journalists and other people gathered — all of them strangers to me, yet they would look at me as though I were someone dear and close to them, and some of them would

take various pictures of me...

I did not understand what the word "theater" meant until after I turned five... One afternoon my grandmother came to take me on a surprise outing... When I asked her where she was taking me, she answered calmly: You will see in a few minutes... and I kept silent until I should see... And I saw the "Vic" theater on Waterloo Road — indeed I entered it at my grandmother's side, and she seated me next to her on a cushion she had bought espe-cially for me so that I could see the play my mother was giving that night, which the Queen and her sister Margaret attended... It was A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Robert Helpmann played Oberon; when Queen Titania entered, I leapt from my seat and cried out with excitement: That's Mama!...

I remember that I passed through the most affecting experience of my life, and after that night I decided to become an actress... Years later, after I had left secondary school in Switzerland, I applied to the Old "Vic" theater school and was accepted as an auditor. By that time my mother had married Sir Laurence Olivier, whom I count the greatest uncle in the world — he is wise and intelligent, understands the subtlest matters, and handles them in wonderful ways.

I did not follow my lessons