Gone With the Wind star keeps fighting
Olivia de Havilland angry over how she was portrayed on TV series
Olivia de Havilland was more than just angry when she learned how she was portrayed in last year’s FX limited series
Feud: Bette and Joan. The Hollywood legend felt blindsided by the show.
“Mystification and indignation,” the 102-year-old star of Gone With the Wind, The Heir
ess and other classic movies recalled feeling in a recent email interview from her home in Paris.
“I was furious. I certainly expected that I would be consulted about the text. I never imagined that anyone would misrepresent me.”
The two-time Oscar-winning actress is refusing to back down in her year-and-a-half-long battle with FX Networks, alleging the 21st Century Fox-owned cable network never obtained her permission and defamed her in the Ryan Murphy-produced limited series.
Despite losing her bids in a California appeals court in March and the state Supreme Court in July, the star is now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to consider her case. In what has shaped up to be a battle over 1st Amendment rights, de Havilland is seeking to reverse the appeals court decision so she can pursue a jury trial.
Defamation disputes are common in Hollywood, where fictionalized dramas depicting real-life people are a staple of TV and films. Movies as recent as
The Wolf of Wall Street and The Hurt Locker have been targeted by the people they portray. But de Havilland is one of the most prominent figures to take a studio to court over the way she was depicted.
De Havilland contends FX violated her free speech rights by deliberately misrepresenting her as a profane gossip and attributing false words to her, including obscenities aimed at her sister, actress Joan Fontaine.
Though experts say the actress faces an uphill battle because she is a public figure, the major studios are watching the case closely. A victory for the star would have serious repercussions on how they make biopics and other shows.
The actress was just 27 when she risked her career by suing Warner Bros. in 1943 over her restrictive studio contract. The studio blacklisted her, but she prevailed in a landmark ruling that bears her name: the De Ha- villand Law, which is still part of the California Labour Code and prohibits the enforcement of personal services contracts beyond seven years.
Now, de Havilland is proving once again that she is a tenacious studio adversary, even at her advanced age.
“It is essential not to give up in any struggle one undertakes,” de Havilland said, conveying some of the graceful fortitude of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, her Gone With the Wind character.
FX also isn’t backing down and, last month, asked the Supreme Court to pass on the case.
De Havilland’s lawyers fired back, arguing that the appeals court’s decision protects “knowing falsehoods about living persons in profitable docu- dramas.” The high court could make a decision as early as next month.
One of the few living stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age, De Havilland moved to France more than half a century ago for marriage and has remained there. Her life in retirement is quiet, but she stays busy, according to people close to her.
At the heart of her dispute with FX is how much liberty docudramas like Feud can take when portraying living people. While the studio contends that dramatizations are protected by the 1st Amendment, de Havilland is arguing that Feud crossed the line.
In real life, de Havilland has said little publicly about Fontaine, who died in 2013, despite gossip that the sisters didn’t al- ways get along. The FX show, de Havilland alleged, damaged her “professional reputation for integrity, honesty, generosity, self-sacrifice and dignity.”
Most legal experts see de Havilland’s case as a long shot, saying the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case only if it concurs that the 1st Amendment issues in question will have wider legal repercussions.
In past defamation cases, courts have sided with the moviemakers.
The case hinges on just a few lines of dialogue in Feud, which FX first aired in March of last year.
The Emmy-nominated, eightpart limited series is a cat-fight soap opera depicting the professional rivalry between Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange), focusing on their backbiting antics during the making of the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? De Havilland, portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones, is a supporting character who appears in a handful of scenes.
De Havilland said she would have been open to discussion if the show’s producers had contacted her first. But she said they never did.
“I would have engaged a lawyer and have insisted that the two of us be consulted about any text which involved me,” de Havilland said. “If the actress who portrayed me had asked to meet with me, I would have agreed to do so, under proper conditions.”
Her case focuses mostly on three scenes in Feud. In one scene, Zeta-Jones refers to Fontaine by saying: “You know what my bitch sister has taken to telling the press?” In another scene, she declines a movie role, explaining: “Oh no, I don’t do bitches. They make me so unhappy. You should call my sister.”
De Havilland has argued that she has never publicly referred to her sister as a “bitch.” She has admitted to calling Fontaine a “dragon lady” but maintains that the two phrases are completely different in meaning and tone. The California appeals court disagreed, ruling that the “bitch” remarks “are not highly offensive to a reasonable person and are, in addition, substantially truthful characterizations of her actual words.”
The third scene involves an exchange between de Havilland and Bette Davis. The de Havilland character makes a remark about her friend Frank Sinatra, saying that the singer must have drunk all the liquor in his dressing room.
De Havilland has argued the scene portrays her as a “vulgar gossip” and “hypocrite.” But the appeals court again disagreed.
As de Havilland awaits the Supreme Court’s decision, she continues with her daily life in relative privacy.
Last year, she was made a dame of the British Empire, the oldest living person to receive the honour. De Havilland was born in 1916 to British parents in Tokyo but moved as a young girl to Northern California, growing up in Saratoga.
When asked what accounts for her willingness to battle with Hollywood studios — Fox now, Warner Bros. then — de Havilland offered a succinct explanation.
“It is only natural for me to take on these institutions because they are in error.”