For two and a half years, the press speculated about who would play the iconic role of Scarlett O'Hara in David O. Selznick's production of Gone with the Wind. Various names were attached to the role by the media, including stars Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Paulette Goddard. David O. Selznick found his leading lady after a search that the New York Times called “a national emergency over the selection of a Scarlett O'Hara.” Fourteen hundred women auditioned to play the Georgia belle from Margaret Mitchell's bestselling 1936 book – but when it went to Vivien Leigh, a British actress with only a few screen credits to her name, readers gasped. Southerners in particular were less than thrilled.
“Scarlett O'Hara is southern, old southern, with traditions and inborn instincts of the South,” one reader wrote to the Los Angeles Times. “How in the name of common sense can an English actress possibly understand Scarlett, her times and the characterization is beyond a thinking American.” So concerned were Georgians with Leigh's preparation that they created an agricultural problem: when the actress said she wasn't familiar with the june bug, hundreds mailed specimens to her at Selznick-International Studios in Culver City. The California agricultural commission, worried about the Georgia insect's effect on western peach buds, reportedly asked the post office to stop mailings from Georgia to Vivien Leigh.
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