Podcast#16 ‘A girl alone in the world has to keep a hold on her emotions or she’ll be lost’: Reframing Vivien Leigh with Dr Lisa Stead

The 16th Here’s Looking At You podcast is a conversation with senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University of Exeter, Dr Lisa Stead.

Lisa is currently working on a very exciting AHRC-funded project entitled Reframing Vivien Leigh: Stardom, Archives and Access. This project examines for the first time how the legacies of screen star Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) are archived and curated by a range of public institutions in the South West of England.

For those who don’t recognise the name straight away, leigh was a stage and screen actress and two-time academy award winner and the female lead in the 1939 cinematic epic Gone With the Wind

I talk to Lisa about this project and, as I was in the process of putting the finishing touches to a one-day postgraduate archives event when we spoke, we also about the rewards of archival research.

Otherwise we talk about stardom and celebrity, both now and in the past, about fame and mental health, about who inspires Lisa as scholar and much more.

To find out more about Lisa’s Reframing Vivien Leigh project, visit: the Stardom and the Archive blog at www.blogs.exeter.ac.uk

Or follow the project on Twitter at @ReframingVL

To check out the call for papers for her Stardom and the Archives conference on the 8th and 9th of February 2020 see: www.blogs.exeter.ac.uk

This podcast can also be downloaded via iTunes, thanks to the technical wizardry of Phyll Smith

Music is  by kind permission of The Shannon Reilly Trio. The song Trouble can be found, along with its video, via this link and purchased on the Shannon Reilly Trio album Trouble.

The podcast was produced thanks to the post-production expertise of John Ashbrook of Radio Pictures.