Actor often typecast as arm candy
Fresh out of high school and with a scholarship to Mills College, the 18-year-old actor deferred admission to appear in Max Reinhardt’s staging of the Bard’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre. She would later become a second understudy in Reinhardt’s Hollywood Bowl production.
De Havilland referred to Reinhardt as “the greatest director in the world,” and, as luck would have it, she took the stage as Hermia when both her predecessors left the comedy before the première.
Soon after that, Warner Bros. tapped Reinhardt to direct the studio’s flashy 1935 film adaptation with William Dieterle, leading De Havilland to a contract with the studio in 1934 and a starting salary of $200 a week.
As a contract player at Warner Bros., she made nearly two dozen films — eight of them with leading man Errol Flynn.
De Havilland’s “Shakespeare all the way” expectation of prestige roles at Warner Bros. was not to be so. The studio, known primarily for gangster melodramas led by male stars such as Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, often typecast her as arm candy or in ingenue roles, often playing opposite fellow newcomer Flynn.
Together they became one of the Hollywood’s most popular romantic duos, beginning with the swashbuckler Captain Blood (1935) and their most enduring pairing in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
“I think of Errol all the time,” de Havilland told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “In different ways, almost every day … He really was a mixed-up man, but of course he was extraordinary-looking and had great charm.” (The rakish matinée ido died of a heart attack in 1959 following years of philandering, heavy drinking and drug use.)
Their final film was Raoul Walsh’s 1941 biopic They Died With Their Boots On, in which he played General Custer and she played his supportive wife.
“I sensed it really was our last film together,” said De Havilland, “even though I did not know it then. After all, I did have two more years to go on my contract. Yet I experienced a sense of grief and loss, a terrible feeling, but couldn’t define it at the time. I had sort of a sense of that you may know a person one way but not others. Errol and I were not sharing experiences and life, but instead sharing the lives of these characters we were playing.
“But, oh, he did mean a great deal to me, but in that day a woman did not declare her feelings for a man. When his autobiography came out, I couldn’t resist checking the index and going to the page where he mentioned me. He said he thought he loved me. ‘Thought!’ That meant he didn’t! I didn’t read another word! Then several years ago, when I was returning for the release of the DVD version of Gone With the Wind, I was determined to read more. I began with his second sentence about me in which he said that he decided that he did love me. To think of all those years I didn’t believe he did.”
De Havilland was also romantically linked to Howard Hughes, James Stewart, John Huston and several others. She married writer Marcus Aurelius Goodrich, author of the bestseller Delilah, in 1946 and they had a son named Benjamin before divorcing in 1952. A year later, De Havilland met Pierre Galante, a writer and executive of Paris Match magazine, and they wed in 1955, had a daughter, Giselle, and divorced in 1979.
She took on substantial roles while on loan to other studios — MGM’s Gone With the Wind and Paramount’s Hold Back the Dawn among them.
De Havilland took secret meetings to play “namby-pamby” Melanie in George Cukor’s Gone With the Wind. A top director at MGM, Cukor suggested “something entirely illegal” and asked De Havilland to surreptitiously journey to the Culver City-based studio and meet with producer David O. Selznick. The proposition easily could have incited legal action by Warner if the obstinate exec were to find out.
“[Cukor] said tell no one, absolutely no one. I went to a secret entrance and they were waiting for me at the appointed time. They unlocked the door to the entrance and let me in to George’s office,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.
She read two scenes, committed them to memory and read them again for Selznick. He agreed to cast her in the epic if Warner would agree to loan her out. He didn’t.
“So I called up Mrs. Warner and asked her to have tea with me,” De Havilland said. “She agreed and I told her how much the part meant to me. She had been an actress before she married Jack. She said: ‘I understand how you feel and I will try to help you.’ She was the one who persuaded Jack to let me go.”
The 1939 blockbuster earned 13 Academy Award nominations and won eight. De Havilland’s costar Vivien Leigh clinched the lead actress Oscar as Scarlett O’Hara, while De Havilland lost in the supporting category to costar Hattie McDaniel, whose role as Mammy made her the first African American entertainer to win an Oscar.
But De Havilland’s nod further strengthened her resolve for more substantial roles in serious pictures.
De Havilland earned her second Oscar nomination for 1941’s Hold Back the Dawn at Paramount, playing an honest American schoolteacher in the romance.
She took on the studio system at age 27 — and won.
Though studio boss Warner jump-started her career, he would soon become De Havilland’s courtroom rival.
When the studio lobbed roles she deemed unacceptable, De Havilland began taking unpaid suspensions as retribution. Following Hold Back the Dawn, she waited out her seven-year contract, which was set to expire in 1943, eager to take on meatier parts elsewhere.
However, California labour statutes favoured employers at the time, and the “peonage” law, as she called it, meant the studio was entitled to six more months’ worth of work and could tack on her suspension penalties to the end of her contract.
De Havilland took them to court, backed by the Screen Actors Guild, and the battle went all the way up to the Supreme Court of California, which ultimately ruled in her favour by deciding that contracts had to be restricted to seven calendar years of service.
Decades later, De Havilland’s legal precedent helped musician and future Oscar winner Jared Leto persuade the courts to apply the De Havilland Law to recording contracts as well.