Was Viven Leigh a promiscuous bisexual?

Academy award winner Oscar Viven Leigh was a bisexual who fought mental illness throughout her adult life, a new biography has revealed.

Damn You, Scarlett O'Hara -- co-authored by Darwin Porter and Roy Moseley-documents at least three of Leigh's lesbian lovers.

It also describes her unquenchable desire for "rough trade".

'In the 1940s, the world's most recognizable star would drive down to Scotty's with her friend George Cukor, the initial director of Gone With The Wind, and they would both pick out young men for the night,' the New York Post quoted a publishing source as telling the Sunday Times.

'They would pay the men with gifts such as cigarette cases, jewels, or even stocks and bonds. She depended on the professional discretion of men not to boast they had just serviced Scarlett O'Hara,' added the source.

Leigh was seeing another rising star, Laurence Olivier, who left his lesbian wife for her.

However, unpublished memoirs and witness accounts have suggested that within months of becoming lovers in 1937, they were both "playing away from home," claim Porter, who knew the actress in the '60s, and Moseley, who was Olivier's personal assistant.

Apart from an affair with Brit actress Isabel Jeans and at least two other women, the book claims Leigh slept with a couple of handsome co-stars like Marlon Brando and Rex Harrison.

Image: Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind.