Dame of the golden age who revolutionised Hollywood
Olivia de Havilland, one of the icons of the golden age of Hollywood, has died aged 104 in her sleep at her home in Paris. In a career spanning 53 years, she appeared in 49 films, most famously in Gone with the Wind. Her big break came in 1935 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and she made eight films with Errol Flynn. Her family life was tempestuous, marked by a feud with her actress sister, Joan Fontaine. She was made a dame in 2017.
Olivia de Havilland was not merely one of the greatest stars the movies ever gave us. The very idea of the movie star as we know it was a de Havilland creation. In the early Forties, de Havilland was already known around the world for enormous swell-and-spectacle productions such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, both opposite Errol Flynn, and Gone With the Wind – all of which she’d carried off before she turned
23 years old. But she was still shackled to a seven-year contract with Warner Bros, who had cultivated her as their in-house sweet young thing, and by 1943, she had tired of being typecast.
De Havilland began to turn down roles for which the studio thought she was perfect, and that meant war. She was first suspended for six months, then drawn into a two-year legal battle that put her then-thriving career entirely on hold. But the ruling, which rocked the whole industry, unexpectedly went in her favour. Actors had suddenly been granted creative freedom. She had turned herself, and all of her kind, into artists.
Spotted in a 1934 community theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (she played Puck), de Havilland found fame as a good girl at a time when the fashion ran to femmes fatales and scarlet dames. Scarlett, of course, was the name of the woman against whom she was defined in Gone With the Wind, in which she played the stoic, honourable Melanie Hamilton opposite Vivien Leigh’s O’hara, the sultry and impetuous heroine of the piece.
Melanie was the first of five roles for which de Havilland would be nominated for an Academy Award: the first of two wins came seven years later for her leading turn in Mitchell Leisen’s romantic drama To Each His Own, in which she played an unmarried mother watching a former lover and his wife raise her son at a remove. The role was the opposite of the kind for which she’d been groomed, but her performance helped make To Each His Own one of her very finest films. Classical Hollywood had space for great actors and big stars, and de Havilland was both. Those two early films with Flynn were both staggering hits, and the two would collaborate on six more over the course of their careers. Their chemistry was so intoxicating, the camera itself often seemed on the brink of swooning – and the exact nature of their off-screen connection became the subject of much gossip and guesswork, though de Havilland waited until she was 92 to confirm an (unconsummated) romance. Still more speculation swirled around de Havilland’s relationship with her younger sister, the actress Joan Fontaine.
Rivals since childhood, their chosen profession virtually pitted them as nemeses – backstage at the 1947 Oscars, the victorious de Havilland was photographed seemingly snubbing Fontaine’s offer of congratulations.
In Robert Siodmak’s film noir The Dark Mirror, released the previous year, de Havilland gave a thrillingly wily and ambiguous dual performance as twins, one good, the other very much not. Intentional or not, the real-life resonance has often been noted. De Havilland herself, with that face that shone with whatever you brought to it, surely knew that it was all part of the dance.
Their chemistry was so intoxicating, the camera often seemed on the brink of swooning