Second best
What are the odds of this?
From Mia Farrow’s autobiography, What Falls Away:
My mother [actress Maureen O’Sullivan], her father’s favorite, went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. She hated it. They had to wear vests in the bath, and were told that “whistling on the stairs makes Our Lady cry.” Vivien Leigh was in the same class, the only girl in the school, according to my mother, who had any sense of direction: from the age of eleven she knew she would be an actress…Vivien Leigh was voted “prettiest girl in the school,” and when my mother came in second, she cried all day, unable to believe that anyone thought she was pretty.
I don’t know which is more astounding: that Vivien Leigh and Maureen O’Sullivan were in the same class at the same school, that Maureen O’Sullivan ever doubted that she was pretty, or that all the girls were made to wear vests in the bath.
So, who’s the prettiest girl in the school?
I dunno. I’m still scratching my head over those modesty vests.
Maureen O’Sullivan gets my vote, hands down.
Johnny Weissmuller’s (Tarzan) first ‘Jane’ she was a beautiful woman who exuded a natural class without pretentiousness.
I have long found it fascinating that individuals of note, whether fame or fortune, seem to have common links to the past. The Maureen O’Sullivan/Vivian leigh connection is but one. There’s Tommy Lee Jones/Al Gore (roommates at Harvard) as another. We often find out that so-and-so went to the same high school as yet another well-known person, and I don’t mean Berverly Hills High School where so many stars’ children go (although it happens there,too, albeit less surprisingly). No I’m talking about a school in the middle of Kansas, or Texas, where somehow, individuals who have taken a common path reveal a common social ancestry.
The next level up is what I’ve called “watershed” films; where more than one of a group of young unknown actors go on to have notable careers. The Breakfast Club, The Big Sleep, St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lords of Flatbush, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, all of these and more have served as launching pads for multiple careers.
I only mention celebrities here because they are the individuals who are mostly known to us. I’d bet that one finds the same thing happening with especially successful engineers, scientists and architects although their careers are more personal and more difficult to publicly document.
The photos can’t really settle the question one way or the other, since they show the girls all grown up. I’d actually go with the contemporaneous vote of the student body as the best evidence of which girl was prettier as a child.
I would also note that, according to IMDB, O’Sullivan was two and a half years older than Vivian Leigh. Perhaps the voting occurred during one of those dreaded “awkward” phases girls and boys go through.
As for the grownup versions, I suppose Leigh is prettier, but they’re both so ridiculously beautiful, it seems almost churlish to compare.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Vivian Leigh was the superior actress.
Vests in the bath? Why not? After all Annette Funicello was made to wear an Ace Bandage around the chest on the Mickey Mouse Club.
I’m with G.B. I’m not sure I ever quite fell for Vivien. Amiable, pretty, but she seemed to have to try. She seemed mean, petty, or something back behind that smile. She worked at being pretty, too? And she is, and was naturally, attractive, but it seemed she pushed it, was selling it, or something. Maybe I just think about things too much.
I remember my mother having fits about being required to wear bloomers. I’ll have to ask her if she ever heard about modesty vests. It’s news to me.
Maureen O’ Sullivan. Wins hands down over Vivian.
The most astounding thing is either that Mia Farrow wrote an autobiography, or that someone actually read it.
Occam’s Beard,
hehehehe
I didn’t get the punch line until you told the joke though.
I’d bet that one finds the same thing happening with especially successful engineers, scientists and architects although their careers are more personal and more difficult to publicly document.
It happens pretty routinely with scientists, who are a lot like MLB players – everyone moves around between a limited number of places.
Supporting personal anecdote. A fellow passenger on a plane turned out to be faculty member (not in my field) from Berkeley, where I’d spent a number of years. After we discussed people we both knew, he asked where I’d been since. University X as an assistant prof, then university Y in Europe as a full prof, I replied.
“Oh, do you know So-and-so at X?” he asked.
“Yes, in fact I dated her for a while.”
“And do you know Bloggs at Y?” he continued.
“Yes, he’s my tennis partner.”
An onlooker was astonished. Two total strangers had found altogether half a dozen connections between them, ranging over eight thousand miles and two continents. But neither of us was surprised. It’s a small community indeed.
OB,
I am duly amazed by small world stories (I am a participant in one of the smallest such stories I know), but my point above was even moreso about small ancestry stories (especially what I call social ancestries) such as people coming from the same high school or same neighborhood or befriending each other in college. Certain areas seem to produce, at certain times, a burst of people who go on to make a name or excel (not one and the same). It almost makes one believe that the scales of fate are tipped in a certain direction from time to time and that there’s nothing mere mortals can do about it.
Just Because You See It, Doesn’t Mean It’s Gone
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/08/just_because_you_see_it_doesnt.html
and
and
I’d bet that one finds the same thing happening with especially successful engineers, scientists and architects although their careers are more personal and more difficult to publicly document.
Huxley family
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_family
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825—1895) was an English biologist, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his defence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
In 1855, he married Henrietta Anne Heathorn (1825—1915), an English émigrée whom he had met in Sydney. They had five daughters and three sons:
Noel Huxley (1856—1860), died aged 4.
Jessie Oriana Huxley (1856—1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877
Marian Huxley (1859—1887) married artist John Collier in 1879
Leonard Huxley (1860—1933), married Julia Arnold.
Rachel Huxley (1862—1934) married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884.
Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863—1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.
Henry Huxley (1865—1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London
Ethel Huxley (1866—1941) married artist John Collier (widower of her sister) in 1889
Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley KBE (1902—1988)
Leonard Huxley (1860—1933), the most prominent of THH’s children, had six children, several of whom left their mark on the twentieth century.
His first wife was Julia Arnold (1862—1908), founder in 1902 of Prior’s Field School
his wife’s father was Tom Arnold (1823—1900), who married Julia Sorell, granddaughter of a former governor of Tasmania.
Julia Arnold’s sister was the best-selling novelist Mary (who wrote as Mrs Humphry Ward), her uncle the poet Matthew Arnold, and her grandfather the influential Rugby School headmaster Thomas Arnold. In her youth she and her sister Ethel had inspired Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) to invent doublet (now called word ladder).
Leonard and Julia had four children, including the biologist Sir Julian Sorell Huxley and the writer Aldous Leonard Huxley.
After the death of his first wife, Leonard married Rosalind Bruce (1890—1994), and had two further sons. The elder of these was David Bruce Huxley (born 1915), whose daughter Angela Huxley married George Pember Darwin, son of the physicist Sir Charles Galton Darwin (and thus a great-grandson of Charles Darwin married a great-granddaughter of Thomas Huxley). The younger son (1917-2012) was the Nobel prize winner, physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley.
Julian Huxley (1887—1975) was the first Director-General of UNESCO. He was Secretary of Zoological Society and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund. He won the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society, the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society, the Kalinga Prize and the Lasker Award. He presided over the founding conference for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He wrote fifty books.
and his brother tried to clue us in on the one world communist state his brother was making.
by the way, trace it back and obama is related to george bush, and the royal families… as is many others…
even funkier is to trace some of these families back to the first soviet revolutionaries.
is Axelrod related to Pavel Axelrod?
after all… STALINS daughter ended up in wisconsin… so i guess you can say stalins daughter turned out to be a cheesehead..
Well, it was the other girls who thought Vivian was prettier.
Vivien Leigh.
Frankly, I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.”
Nor should you, beauty being in the eye of the beholder.
Leigh was certainly a beauty but Doom nailed it, Leigh’s beauty is solely external. She’s so convincing as Scarlet because she’s emoting natural aptitudes.
Personally, I found de Havilland’s character Melanie far more attractive, whose inner beauty is the mirror for Scarlet’s external beauty.
Sullivan’s external beauty is a reflection of her inner beauty. She was the perfect foil for the Tarzan character; natural man uncorrupted.
Completely off topic, but I was struck by the title of Farrow’s autobiography, from a Roethke poem that haunted me for years.
” . . . This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/104.html
Must go with Maureen, who could do Jane and could also hold her own with (or against) the Marx Bros. Leigh always seemed fragile, which some people do find attractive. You had the feeling that Maureen was petite but by golly she had an inner toughness.
Wow! Was Mia adopted?
Maureen was fine as Jane and in A Day at the Races, but those roles hardly required any serious acting. VL’s performances in GWTW and Streetcar were monumental achievements.
Seems unfair to VL that she evidently loses “beauty” points on account of being such a good actress (insofar as people ascribe ScarlettO’hara’s personal qualities to Vivian Leigh), and then loses acting points because people decide they don’t care for her looks!
I wasn’t going to comment on this thread, but ultimately could not resist adding my 2 cents. Maureen wins my vote for most attractive to males. Leigh was the better actress by a slim margin. In the end the deciding factor for me is found in the smiles. Maureen comes across as open and friendly. She could be the girl next door that one has known for years or the knock babe you fall for at first sight. Leigh comes across as coquettish and smug in my eyes. A woman who wants to be chased and for whom love is a game.
Occam’s Beard: Mia Farrow’s autobiography is actually not bad, as these things go. Her father, you know, wrote quite a few serious books (some of them histories) and he was a well-known screenwriter, and she’s pretty well-read. I took her book out of the library because a woman who’s been married or in quasi-marriage with the following three people—Frank Sinatra, Andre Previn, and Woody Allen—is bound to be at least somewhat interesting. And actually, she is (plus, I was curious about the Woody Allen story from her POV).
@parker: “by a SLIM margin”? Really? I’d suggest people take at VL’s wikipedia page to get a sense of Leigh’s achievements as a film and stage actress. MO was a great looking lady and a charming presence on screen, but she wasnt in the same league as far as acting goes.
conrad,
I’ve seen many films from that era. From my POV VL on screen was unappealing at times, while MS was charming and full of life. Its all a matter of taste in the end, but I’ll take Jane over Scarlett any day when it comes to judging what makes a woman appealing.
There used to be a great deal more involved in getting a starring role–the casting couch comes to mind–but acting is acting, I suppose.
I despised GWTW the 1st time I saw it, and that persists to this day, mostly because I suspect VL played herself in that role. My ex worships her and conducts herself like VL in the fim, totally self-centered.
Of course, the British “vest” is the American “undershirt.”
But look at this (Maetenloch posted it on Ace):
>>The Fecklessness of the Obama Administration’s Policy Towards Israel
They’re quietly attempting to make a separate ‘peace’ with Iran in hopes of avoiding any blowback from an Israeli attack.
Diplomatic sources tell Israeli journalists that the U.S. is scrambling to distance itself from the Israel and appears to be giving Iran the green light to launch a counter-strike, if Israel attacks first:
The United States has indirectly informed Iran, via two European nations, that it would not back an Israeli strike against the country’s nuclear facilities, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday.
According to the report, Washington used covert back-channels in Europe to clarify that the US does not intend to back Israel in a strike that may spark a regional conflict.
To anyone outside of Foggy Bottom, this “proposal” is the height of fecklessness–a veritable fool’s errand that will almost guarantee the opposite results.
The problem with selling out Israel for an Iranian promise is that you’ll get all the dishonor of doing so and will likely get war as well given the usual trustworthiness of Iranian promises. So you can guess which way Obama will go.<<
Oh MY GOD
Neo,
When you put it that way… And yeah, the Woody Allen thing? Of course… some things I am not sure I want to know, I just don’t think there is an excuse for some behavior.
Still, I loved OB’s joke. Just as a joke. Never… mind…
Couldn’t be any weirder that those blue jumpsuit / bloomers the girls had to wear in P.E.
@ parker: Obviously, the issue of what kind of looks appeal to you is entirely subjective. However, you made a statement as to which one was the better actress. Maybe Vivian Leigh didn’t always look captivating on screen (e.g, in “A Streetcar Named Desire”); but that’s hardly a knock on her acting. If anything, it takes great acting for someone as beautiful as VL to appear “unappealing” when the character and the scene requires it. Leigh was utterly convincing in GWTW as the girl all the guys would make fools of themselves over, but there were plenty of moments in that movie when you were meant to see the ugly person behind Scarlett’s pretty face. Thanks to VL’s great gifts as an actress, you saw the whole character in complete 3D.
Back to Maureen O’Sullivan for a moment: She was delightful to watch, but I don’t see how a serious case can be made that she was one of the greatest 20 or so screen actresses of all time, which Vivian surely was. Admittedly, I doubt I’ve seen all of her movies, but the fact she is best known for her portrayal of Jane should tell us something, shouldn’t it?
Alex earlier said she could hold her own against the Marx Brothers — oh please! That’s only true if “hold her own against” is synonymous with “appeared in a movie with.”
Maybe MO had vast untapped reservoirs of talent and COULD have become a great actress, but all we have to go on is the celluloid record, and it clearly shows that VL was the better actress by a mile.
I loved the Weismuller/O’Sullivan Tarzan films as a young boy (which I watched on late afternoon TV’s daily “Valley Playhouse” via KCRA-3 Sacramento, NBC; I fondly recall years of being “schooled” on classic films of the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, after getting home from school).
I just came across this on Wikipedia … After appearing in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), O’Sullivan asked MGM to release her from her contract so she could care for her husband who had just left the Navy with typhoid. She then retired from show business, devoting her time to being a wife and mother.” which brought my early impression of O’Sullivan full circle.
…there was “no contest” in my mind, either.
Growing up in England, we called our undershirts “vests”, so I’m betting that’s what they were. Not so terrible after all.
Geoffrey- it appears I need to work on my Rhett Butler impersonation a bit more.
Vivian, hands down. Not even close.