A new biography claims Gone with the Wind siren Vivien Leigh was bisexual – and liked to sleep with male prostitutes.
Damn You, Scarlett O' Hara claims Leigh's 20-year marriage to Laurence Olivier was a façade, stating the couple repeatedly cheated on each other within months of first becoming lovers in 1937.
The book is written by Darwin Porter, who knew the actress in the 1960s, and co-authored by Roy Moseley, a former assistant to Olivier.
It reveals unpublished memoirs suggesting Leigh had at least three lesbian affairs, including one with fellow British actress Isabel Jeans.
The book also claims she liked "rough trade" and would travel with a gay director to a male brothel in downtown Los Angeles.
A publishing source has told the Daily Mail, "In the 1940s the world's most recognisable star would drive down to Scotty's with her friend George Cukor, the initial director of Gone with the Wind, and they would pick out young men for the night."
The biography, based on the memoirs and witness accounts, also says Leigh was once kicked out of an Italian hotel for bringing back street boys.
The authors of the biography say Leigh and Olivier "were both beautiful and both wanted more".
"Vivien loved to torture Olivier with her affairs, especially after she grew more mentally ill, depressed and manic."
The publisher source told the Daily Mail, "today, she would be diagnosed as bipolar and there are drugs that would help, but in those days people did not know how to deal with a star who tore off all her clothes and ran out of her house."
Olivier's sexuality has been the subject of constant speculation over the years, with many biographies and accounts claiming he slept with men, something his last wife Joan Plowright refused to deny in a 2006 interview, stating that he had his "demons".
Leigh died in 1967 of tuberculosis, aged 53.
