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 seeing the rough cuts, agreed. Portraitist Al Hirschfeld created a drawing, and then a lithograph, portraying the film's stars Clift, Monroe, and Gable with screenwriter Miller, in what is suggested as a typical "on-the-set" scene during the troubled production. Throughout his life, Gable was fond of the work of artist Reinhold Palenske, and they were close friends. Gable was a conservative Republican, though he never publicly spoke about politics. His third wife, Carole Lombard, was an activist liberal Democrat, and she cajoled him into supporting Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1944, he became an early