Vivien Leigh, styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her performances as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. She also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway musical version of Tovarich (1963). Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema.

Katie Scarlett O'Hara is a fictional character and the protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and in the 1939 film of the same name, where she is portrayed by Vivien Leigh. She also is the main character in the 1970 musical Scarlett and the 1991 book Scarlett, a sequel to Gone with the Wind that was written by Alexandra Ripley and adapted for a television mini-series in 1994. During early drafts of the original novel, Mitchell referred to her heroine as "Pansy", and did not decide on the name "Scarlett" until just before the novel went to print. PBS has called O'Hara "quite possibly the most famous female character in American history..."