Her real-life character informed her acting persona, and that character was a tricky one. Leigh was clever, sexy, fragile and difficult. Noël Coward wrote in his diary: “She is such a darling when she is all right and such a conceited little bitch when she isn’t all right.” Her natural feline complexity found an outlet in Scarlett O’Hara, whom she played in Gone With the Wind (1939). Ninety Hollywood stars tested for the role, which was snatched by a relative unknown with a Roedean accent. “She could,” as the actor Wilfred Hyde-White once said, “have been Prime Minister, for nothing ever deterred her from getting her way.” She had been similarly hellbent upon capturing Laurence Olivier. They married in 1940, a few months after Leigh became the first British actress to win a leading-role Oscar.