Oscar Awards 2023: This Darjeeling-born actress has won two Academy Awards. Do you know her?

For an average Indian, India's journey to the Oscars starts with Mehboob Khan's Mother India, the country's first Oscar-nominated movie in the Foreign Film category in 1958.

For them, Bhanu Athaiya (1982) is the first Academy Award winner from India, while legendary Satyajit Ray (1992) is a lifetime achievement awardee.

Slumdog Millionaire is the first movie for which multiple Indians, including Gulzar and AR Rahman, won the Oscars in 2009, and the Naatu Naatu song and short film The Elephant Whisperers are the latest additions to the list of Indian Oscar recipients.

There is nothing wrong with their information.

However, not many ardent movie fans know that years before Indians started celebrating their success at the Oscars, there was a Darjeeling-born Anglo-Indian girl who had won two Academy Awards.

In fact, her first Oscar came before India became free from the clutches of Britishers.

She was the heartthrob of the 1940s for playing the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.

You probably guessed it right! She is Vivien Leigh, also known as Lady Olivier.

Her iconic role in Gone With the Wind helped her win her first Best Actress Oscar Award.

Twelve years later, after that coveted feat, she would prove that she was not a spent force.

In the 1952 Academy Awards, she again won the Best Actress award for her role as Blanche DuBois in the movie, A Streetcar Named Desire, which also had Marlon Brando as her co-star.

For the same role, she won the BAFTA Awards in 1953.

Acknowledging her contribution to movies, in 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema.  

Darjeeling connection 

Leigh was born on November 5, 1913, at the campus of St. Paul's School, Darjeeling, to Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and Gertrude Mary Frances.

Her father was a Scottish while her mother was also born in Darjeeling.

Leigh made her first stage appearance at the just of three for her mother's theatre group.

The actress got admission to Loreto Convent, Darjeeling.

She studied there until the age of six. It was the year 1919 when First World War ended, and she was sent to a convent school in London.

That was the end of her Indian journey. She would never return to the country of her birth, but two decades later, the world would know Leigh for her role in Gone With the Wind.

The film went on to win 10 Academy Awards and established Leigh as one of the best actresses of her era. 

The actress died in 1967 at the age of 53.

Years after her death, she remains a revered figure in Hollywood.

But despite her early association with India, people know little about her local connection.