Vivien Leigh
Like a lot of other women on this list, Vivien Leigh has also said of herself that she had to work hard for people to see past her outer beauty and to get people to believe in her as an actress in her own right, one director even described her as “consummate actress, hampered by beauty”. She earned critical acclaim and much popularity with roles in films like A Streetcar Named Desire and Gone with the Wind, but actually had a much higher profile career on stage rather than on screen. She died of tuberculosis in 1967.
Vivien Leigh
Ava Gardner
Ava Gardner was originally from South Carolina and had a southern accent which apparently MGM studios originally considered incomprehensible! But that didn’t deter her from achieving her goals. She persevered until they signed her, and after five years of doing minor roles, she finally got her big break with the noir film The Killers. This was the beginning of 50 years of stardom for Gardner. Her heavy smoking habit eventually caught up with her in the 1980s, and in 1986 she suffered from emphysema and a stroke that left her paralyzed, and in 1990 she contracted pneumonia which led to her death.
Ava Gardner
