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
Clark Gable to attempt a film career. In 1924, with Dillon's financing, they went to Hollywood, where she became Gable's manager and first wife. He changed his stage name from W. C. Gable to Clark Gable. He found work as an extra in such silent films as Erich von Stroheim's "The Merry Widow" (1925), "The Plastic Age" (1925), which starred Clara Bow, "Forbidden Paradise" (1924), starring Pola Negri, plus a series of two-reel comedies called "The Pacemakers". He appeared as an extra in Fox's "The Johnstown Flood" (1926). Seventeen-year-old Carole Lombard, later his third wife, appeared as an extra in that film