Anna Karenina, a married aristocrat in Tsarist Russia, falls in love with Count Vronsky — and must choose between her family and her heart.
In Anna Karenina (1948), based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Vivien Leigh plays Anna, who is married to Alexei Karenin, a senior government official, and who has a young son. When she meets Count Alexei Vronsky, played by Kieron Moore, at a railway station, she falls passionately in love, and she leaves her husband and her son to live with Vronsky, only to be rejected by the society she once belonged to.
Leigh plays Anna with a tragic intensity that is both beautiful and painful. She shows Anna’s joy, her guilt and her growing despair, as Vronsky’s love cools and society closes its doors to her.
Anna Karenina is a classic literary adaptation, and Leigh’s Anna is one of her most powerful performances: a woman who dares to love, and who is destroyed by a world that will not forgive her.