Blanche DuBois proved to be the first screen role with which Leigh could finally shed the glamorous image that had made her a star in 1935. It was a role she was familiar with, having played it on the London stage in 1949. Silver Screen noted, “she doesn’t care how she looks, even welcoming the disfiguring lines and wrinkles which are artificially applied. She doesn’t want to look beautiful. She doesn’t care about favourable camera angles. She wants to be Blanche.” With her natural beauty subdued by harsh make-up and a frazzled blonde wig, critics were able to properly assess her talent. In Hollywood, she was “England’s great Vivien Leigh,” with a “fluently expressive face, a pair of eyes that can flood with emotion and a body that moves with spirit and style.” Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times called her performance in the film version of Streetcar “a work of art and acting.”

In addition to positioning Leigh as a figure “on the trash heap of history” for the first time, Streetcar marks the moment when the soon-to-be-outmoded performance style of classical Hollywood came face to face with the Method, made popular by newcomers such as Montgomery Clift, James Dean and Leigh’s Streetcar co-star, Marlon Brando. Students of the Method were encouraged to look within themselves and find raw emotions with which to add depth and truth to a character. It was meant as opposition to the previous mode of Hollywood acting epitomised by pre-war stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Today, the melodramatic theatricality that Leigh used for Blanche is seen by some as a hindrance, a sign that her acting skills were rendered obsolete compared to the mumbling, brute force of Brando; that she, as a star, was as outdated as the characters she portrayed. David Thomson accuses Leigh of not seeming to be in the same film as Brando. However, this appraisal glosses over the actors’ different approaches to performance and neglects to consider the essence of her character. As the only non-Method actor in the film, Leigh does stand out as different in her approach to performance, but it works. The fundamental nature of Blanche DuBois is that she is the outmoded outsider who finds herself in a brutal modern environment, devoid of decadence, beauty and love, in which she has no place, and with which she is unable to cope. She is, to quote Brooks, a “transitory tyrant,” who “refuses to pass away” without first putting up a fight.

© kendra 2011. I’m trying to find a way to cut like 500 words from my third diss. chapter and I’m failing. This chapter was my special baby.