In retrospect, Laurence Olivier maintained that he had 'lost' hs wife Vivien Leigh on their Australian tour in 1948, but the extent of his loss was not brought home to him until one day in early spring 1949. Thunderbolts have a way of striking at banal moments. Thus it was not at the climax of any stormy argument, but after an uneventful lunch, sitting in the conservatory of Durham Cottage, that Vivien said 'I don't love you any more.'

Olivier could hardly believe his ears. He recalled sitting there frozen. There was no other man, she assured him. There didn't need to be. Her husband had become "another man' to her. She loved him still, she said, but more as a brother, though he later noted, with sad irony, a number of occasions when 'incest' took place between them.

But could they go on together, he asked. Oh, yes, Vivien said, they would carry on as if nothing had changed - except that they would no longer be partners in anything but their work. Another man might have exploded in anger and animosity at the cruel way the news was broken and the cool manner in which the compromise was proposed. But Olivier characteristically decided to accept it out of guilt as a form of penance for his pride. Their love had been like a religion to him, loss of love was a fall from grace and must be endured with fortitude.

A few weeks earlier, on 22 March 1949, Peter Finch and Edith Evans had opened in Olivier's presentation of Daphne Laureola. It was a sensational West End debut for Finch. He received notices which recalled the ones Vivien had got in The Mask of Virtue. He was written about and spoken of as "another Olivier'.

Friends believe that Vivien and Peter Finch had not immediately become lovers, even though fate had arranged for him to be in the theatre literally next door to the one where she was playing in Antigone. However, the arrival of such a comet may well have made her own domestic horizon pale.

So the Oliviers began work on the stage play of A Streetcar Named Desire in a troubled and nervous mood. In fact, Olivier was not terribly keen on the play, according to Irene Selznick, and consented to direct it only because Vivien talked him into it. 'Talked' is an understatement: she worried him into it.

His objections were not simply textual, though he thought parts of it boring and repetitious, and proposed cutting them -- much to Mrs Selznick's agony. In Olivier's still essentially middle-class view of public life, respectability counted for much. The play's sensational nature offended that respectability. News of its incestuous rape, insanity and nymphomania had appeared in the English papers the minute he'd announced its London production - and with the Lord Chamberlain still censoring the stage's morals, it might be bad timing for an actor-manager just starting out to be put down as an agent provocateur. Then for the Oliviers, the 'stage royals', to dirty their hands with such dubious ingredients! He felt they had to tread as prudently as the real royals. Also, the Church might come out against it. For Olivier, a clergyman's son and a prey to guilt, the prospect of fulmination from the pulpit had to be taken seriously.

It is hard at this remove from English middle-class society of 1949 to realize how deeply these considerations mattered. In fact, the play was to be condemned as "low and repugnant' in the House of Commons and as 'lewd and salacious' by the Public Morality Council. Staging it posed an additional and less obvious risk to Vivien. Her sexuality, aggravated by her recurrent illness, left her elated yet unfulfilled and alarmed by what, in retrospect, it revealed to her about herself. Now her already unsteady psychological balance was being further tested by a play that realistically explored emotions usually portrayed only in safely stylized classical theatre. If there was poetry in Blanche's despair, there was also the risk of contagion in her madness.

Possibly Olivier didn't realize how it would affect Vivien's mental balance in later months. He himself was never possessed by any role he played to the extent of finding it difficult to shake it off once the show had closed. Much later, in a reference to Ronald Colman's film A Double Life, about an actor playing Othello who confuses himself with the part and takes his work home with fatal results, Olivier would mention, in parenthesis, that, 'Alas, this was one of Vivien's abiding problems.' Her friend Alan Dent, a theatre critic whose own sensibility made him aware of the risks to Vivien, begged her not to do the part. 'Impossible,' she responded.

The part allowed Vivien to take a stand against the two epithets she hated most when applied to herself - 'pretty' and even 'beautiful'. Both of them she thought too limiting - they trimmed the flame of the dramatic illumination she sought to spread. She even dressed down for the rehearsals, the better to meet the challenge which playing Blanche DuBois represented. Bernard Braden, cast as Mitch in the play, recalled her arriving on the first day of the run-through wearing a simple black jersey dress. Renee Asherson, playing Blanche's sister, remarked (none too tactfully perhaps, given Vivien's abhorrence of such terms): 'That's a pretty dress.' Vivien took the compliment - though she may have winced - and replied in sombre tones to match her costume:

'I'm glad you like it, because you're going to see a lot of it.'