Movies

Carla Gugino to portray screen legend Vivien Leigh in biopic The Florist

Leigh famously won Best Actress Oscars for "Gone With the Wind" and "A Streetcar Named Desire."

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Published on April 30, 2024 10:31PM EDT

Frankly, my dear, it's time for another biopic.

Spy Kids and Fall of the House of Usher actress Carla Gugino is set to portray screen legend Vivien Leigh, who famously played Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind, in a new movie titled The Florist.

According to Variety, which first reported the news, the film will take place in the 1960s and follow Leigh as she prepares to star in a Broadway production of John Gielgud's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov. It will depict Leigh's struggles with bipolar disorder and electroconvulsive therapy, as well as an unexpected romance with Joseph Penn, a World War II veteran and florist who first encounters Leigh while making a delivery.

EW can confirm Nick Sandow will direct from a script by Jayce Bartok, who wrote the film based on a series of letters. Representatives for Gugino didn't immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment.

"I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity to excavate a woman as complex, contradictory, and compelling as Vivien," Gugino told Variety. "From the moment I read the script, I knew The Florist was a journey I had to pursue."

Carla Gugino and Vivien Leigh.
Stephanie Augello/Variety via Getty; General Photographic Agency/Getty

Widely considered one of the greatest actresses of the classic Hollywood era, Leigh won Best Actress Oscars for Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire (the latter of which saw her playing a Southern belle). Her other credits included Waterloo Bridge, Anna Karenina, and That Hamilton Woman.

Leigh was also known for her relationship Laurence Olivier. The two began an affair while making the 1937 film Fire Over England, while they each were still married to other people. Leigh and Olivier wed in 1940, and she had her first major mental breakdown in the mid-1940s. Her mental health issues, as well as infidelity on both sides, strained her marriage to Olivier until they divorced in 1960.

Because of her struggles with her mental health, Leigh represents a challenging subject for a biopic. Similar to screen icon Marilyn Monroe, her story is ripe for exploitation, exaggeration, and misrepresentation.

That hasn't stopped filmmakers, however. Morgan Brittany portrayed Leigh in three different screen projects from 1976 to 1980. More recently, Julia Ormond played the actress in 2011's My Week With Marilyn and Katie McGuinness portrayed a woefully inaccurate, nymphomaniac iteration of Leigh in Ryan Murphy's Hollywood.

At one time, Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer was attached to play Leigh in a television series she was also producing, based on Kendra Bean's 2013 biography Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait. That project is no longer in development, though it did give us some ideas for who might be good fits to play the other luminaries in Leigh's life.

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