
Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley
on 5 November 1913 in British India on the campus of St. Paul's School, Darjeeling. She was the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances (née Yackjee; she also used her mother's maiden name of Robinson).
Her father was born in Scotland in 1882, while her mother, a devout Roman Catholic, was born in Darjeeling in 1888 and may have been of Irish and Armenian
or Indian ancestry