The bending curvature, stresses, and stress relaxation of various multi-layered structures with different adhesive layers pertaining to the polarizer in a thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) have been successfully characterized by using bending beam technique under reliability test. To be more specific, three different types of pressure-sensitive adhesive (hard-, middle-, and soft-type) and various poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) stretched directions are devised to examine to key stress contributors and correlations with light leakage. The shrinkage stress in stretched PVA film and stress relaxation ability of pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSA) layers are found to be the key factors determining the stress distribution and out-of-plane displacement of a polarizer stack. For hard-type PSA, its polarizer stack generates the highest bending curvature with maximum out-of-plane displacement but minimum in-plane displacement, leading to anisotropic stress distribution with high stress around the edges. On the other hand, polarizer stack with soft-type PSA yields the maximum in-plane displacement but the minimum out-of-plane displacement, resulting in isotropic stress distribution.