That Hamilton Woman

Vivian Leigh always has a way of playing the same character - an unconventional romantic, also somewhat batshit - but this one told a wonderful story. The movie is also rather true to life, they say: kitchen maid, hooker, mistress, wife of nobility, chums with foreign royalty, society fashionista, and lover of the national hero Lord Nelson...and then to the debtor's prison, and death in poverty. Such a tragic love story.

Perhaps she is most famous to the pop consciousness now as the muse to the painter George Romney. I didn't even know it until now, but her face was already famous to me because they used one of the Romney portraits as the cover of my paperback edition to Wuthering Heights.