Vivien Leigh friendship developed after he congratulated her on her performance. Olivier and Leigh began an affair while acting as lovers in "Fire Over England" (1937), but Olivier was still married to actress Jill Esmond. During this period, Leigh read the Margaret Mitchell novel "Gone with the Wind" and instructed her American agent to recommend her to David O. Selznick, who was planning a film version. She remarked to a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara", and "The Observer" film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled a conversation of the same period in which Leigh "stunned us all" with the assertion that
Gone with the Wind (film) the Klan in the film by referring to it only as a "political meeting". Thomas Cripps reasons that the film in some respects undercuts racial stereotypes; in particular, the film created greater engagement between Hollywood and black audiences, with dozens of movies making small gestures in recognition of the emerging trend. Only a few weeks after its initial run, a story editor at Warner wrote a memorandum to Walter Wanger about "Mississippi Belle", a script that contained the worst excesses of plantation films, suggesting that "Gone with the Wind" had made the film "unproducible". More than any film since "The