Hollywood legend Olivia dies aged 104
Why Olivia de Havilland, who has died at 104, was the last of Hollywood’s Golden Age movie stars
THE last star of Hollywood’s Golden Era has taken her final bow, at the age of 104. Dame Olivia de Havilland, two-time Oscar winner and Gone With The Wind icon, died peacefully of natural causes on Saturday at her home in Paris where she had lived for more than 60 years. She won the coveted golden Best Actress statuette for performances in To Each His Own, in 1946, and The Heiress, in 1949. Dame Olivia was nominated five times and appeared in 50 films during a career that spanned five decades.
Her former lawyer Suzelle M Smith said: “The world has lost an international treasure and I have lost a dear friend.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said: “Olivia was a mainstay of the Golden Age and an immeasurable talent. Here’s to a true legend of our industry.” Broadcaster Gyles Brandreth shared a video of Dame Olivia delivering a speech at the Oscars. He said: “Watch this and marvel at how a true star earns a six-minute standing ovation.” US actress Morgan Fairchild said: “A lovely lady and great actress. So gracious.”
During her Hollywood career, she had a reputation as a rule breaker and in 1943 she took on Warner Brothers after the studio tried to keep her on at the end of her contract.
The action was based on an old California law that put a seven-year limit on the period an employer can enforce contracts. It paved the way for actors to be freed from imprisoning agreements.
Dame Olivia was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1916 to British parents and had a troubled relationship with sister Joan Fontaine, who died aged 96 in 2013.
They are the only siblings to have won lead Oscars, Joan being honoured in 1942 for Suspicion.
ASKED about her astonishing longevity at the age of 103 this year, Dame Olivia de Havilland showed neither trepidation nor expectation that she might be nearing the end of her life’s incredible journey. “I would prefer to live forever in perfect health, but if I must leave this life,” purred the grand dame of Hollywood’s Golden Age, “I would like to do so ensconced on a chaise longue, perfumed, wearing a velvet robe and pearl earrings, with a flute of champagne beside me and having just discovered the answer to the last problem in a British crossword.”
It was a gloriously sophisticated image that summed up public perceptions of the star of nearly 50 big-screen movies over half a century, including her best-known role as Melanie Hamilton in David O Selznick’s epic 1939 adaptation of the Margaret Mitchell novel, Gone With The Wind in which she starred with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.
In the event, the two-time Oscar winner died peacefully in her sleep at her home on Saturday, less than a month after celebrating her 104th birthday on July 1 and still apparently enjoying good health.
Earlier this month, Mia Farrow, 75, posted a snap of the star riding a tricycle in Paris, where she had lived since 1960, captioned: “Happy Birthday Olivia de Havilland who turns 104 today – and apparently is still riding her bike.”
It was a remarkable life and career, with two best actress Oscars for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), blighted only by the early death of her son, and one of the most vicious cases of sibling rivalry ever with her younger sister, Joan Fontaine.
Fought over decades on stage and off, the poisonous feud had as much melodrama as any of the big-screen thrillers and romances in which the pair starred.As the sisters – the only siblings ever to have won best actress Academy Awards – became famous, their relationship was a constant source of interest in the gossip columns.
“I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it,” Joan once joked.
THEIR relationship, reputedly characterised by not speaking to one another for six decades, only ended with Joan’s death in December 2013 aged 96. Olivia issued a statement saying she was “shocked and saddened” by her sister’s death.
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born in 1916 to English parents living in Tokyo during the First World War, her sister Joan just 15 months later. Their father, Walter Augustus de Havilland — part of a prominent Guernsey family and related to the British aircraft pioneer Geoffrey de Havilland — was a patent lawyer.
Olivia, Joan and their mother Lillian moved to California in 1919, partly after their father left them to pursue a relationship with their Japanese housekeeper and partly because the girls suffered bronchial problems and their actress-mother hoped the climate would be more agreeable. There, Lillian gave elocution and singing lessons to her two daughters and introduced them to the works of Shakespeare. In 1925 their mother married a department store owner, George M Fontaine, who imposed a strict regime on his two step-daughters. Olivia was bitten by the drama bug while at Saratoga High School, making her stage debut in 1933 in an amateur production of Alice In Wonderland.
She later recalled: “I was actually moving in Alice’s enchanted wonderland. And so, for
the first time, I felt not only pleasure in acting but love for acting as well.”
She was spotted by director Max Reinhardt, who cast her as Hermia in a production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl.
When the play was filmed for Warner Brothers in 1935, she received lukewarm reviews for her screen debut. Her breakthrough came when producer Hal Wallis persuaded the studio to cast her in Captain Blood opposite Australian Errol Flynn.
They starred together in another seven films, including The Charge Of The Light Brigade and The Adventures Of Robin Hood.
As a result, Olivia was central in getting actors better deals with Hollywood’s restrictive studio system. Having begun her career when studio bosses ruled their stars with a rod of iron, her efforts to play more serious roles were hampered by Warner Brothers.
She had risen to prominence as Flynn’s heroine, and wary of being typecast as a perennial damsel in distress, she took the studio to court and eventually won her freedom when bosses tried to extend her seven-year contract to punish her for refusing roles.
The landmark ruling is known today as the “de Havilland law”. She later admitted: “I was told I would never work again, if I lost or won. When I won, they were impressed and didn’t bear a grudge.”
Flynn and De Havilland were rumoured to be lovers, although Olivia insisted in an interview in 2009: “Nothing did ever happen between us.” But she added: “What I felt for Errol Flynn was not a trivial matter at all. I felt terribly attracted to him. And do you know, I still feel it. I still feel very close to him to this day.”
She later said Flynn, who had a reputation as a womaniser, proposed to her but she had turned him down as he was already married.
Throughout the 1930s she appeared in a number of light, romantic films that allowed her to showcase her perfect diction. “Playing good girls in the Thirties was difficult when the fad was to play bad girls,” she admitted.
Then she was offered the role of the virtuous Melanie opposite Vivien Leigh’s wayward Scarlett in Gone With The Wind, receiving much acclaim and an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
She lost out to Hattie McDaniel who played Mammy, making her the first African-American actress to win an award. The movie hit the headlines this year after HBO Max cut the picture from its streaming service, before re-adding it with a new introduction discussing the film’s controversial depiction of slavery in the South. In 1946, she married Navy veteran Marcus Goodrich, and they had one child Benjamin, before divorcing in 1953. Benjamin tragically died aged 42 of heart disease brought on by treatments for Hodgkin’s disease. In the 1950s Olivia moved to France with her second husband Pierre Galante, a journalist and executive editor of the magazine Paris Match. They had a daughter, Gisèle She famously turned down the role of Blanche DuBois in the 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Instead the part went to Vivien Leigh, who won an Oscar.
She continued to act sporadically until the late 1980s, winning a Golden Globe in 1986 for Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna.
She was created a Dame in the 2017 Birthday Honours list.
In 2018, Olivia took legal action over Feud, the drama documenting the rivalry between actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and her portrayal by fellow Oscarwinner Catherine Zeta-Jones.
“When I learned the Olivia de Havilland character called my sister ‘a bitch’ and gossiped about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s personal and private relationship, I was deeply offended,” she told the New York Times. She claimed Feud painted her as a hypocrite “with a public image of being a lady’ and a private one as a scandal-monger. The portrayal damaged her reputation for ‘honesty, integrity and good manners”. The lawsuit was later dismissed by the court.
The last of the major stars of Gone With The Wind, she admitted in an interview several years ago that she still watched the film to connect with her costars. “Luckily it does not make me melancholy,” she said. “Instead, when I see them vibrantly alive on screen, I experience a kind of reunion with them, a joyful one.”