Her manic-depressive interludes never really left her, nor did her incipient TB, which fatally flared up again in 1967. She died at her home on the night of July 7. Hearing the news in his hospital room, where he was being treated for cancer, Olivier immediately discharged himself, and rushed to Leigh’s deathbed. ‘I stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us,’ he later wrote. ‘It has always been impossible for me not to believe that I was somehow the cause of Vivien’s disturbances.’
