Dame Olivia de Havilland
Oscar-winning actress from Hollywood’s golden era who made her name in Gone With the Wind
DAME OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND, who has died aged 104, was a hard-working, apparently unassuming but unforgettable and unforgotten star from Hollywood’s golden era. A capable actress, well-mannered and softly spoken, she had depth and a gentle beauty which lit up roles that might otherwise have seemed cloyingly sweet or merely uninteresting, such as Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Excellent performances in The Snake Pit (1948) and The Heiress (1949) showed that she possessed a wider range, and in a famous clash with the studio she exhibited a steely firmness: but she was always most fondly remembered as the softening feminine element in swashbuckling adventure stories. A highly publicised tiff with her sister, Joan Fontaine (whom she nicknamed “the dragon lady”), spluttered throughout their lives.
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born in Tokyo on July 1 1916, 16 months before Joan; their parents were English. Walter Augustus de Havilland, a cousin of the aircraft manufacturer, Sir Peter de Havilland, taught at the Imperial University and became a specialist in patent law; his wife Lillian had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but, a stage career being deemed unsuitable, only sang in occasional concerts, engaged in amateur dramatics and took a few pupils, the most conspicuous of whom were to be her own daughters.
The marriage was not much of a success. In 1919 it was decided that the two girls, whose health seemed poor, should be taken back to England. The family had reached San Francisco when both daughters fell ill. While they recuperated, Mrs de Havilland took a house in Saratoga, which she liked so much that she decided not to continue the journey at all. Walter de Havilland stayed in Japan, where, after a divorce in 1925, he married his housekeeper and did not see the children again for many years.
They were brought up by their mother in a tranquil small-town atmosphere. She made a point of teaching them elocution, which equipped them with a very pleasant and useful mid-atlantic accent. Olivia also took singing and ballet lessons, but what she liked best were the school plays. Joan, who remained weaker, was allowed to do less, a situation which first triggered some sibling rivalry.
Their mother married George Milan Fontaine, a local shopkeeper. He disapproved of the theatre and regulated the girls’ lives so much that, although they had liked him at first, they rebelled. At the age of 16 Olivia moved out of the house to live with friends.
After attending the Saratoga Grammar School, the Notre Dame Convent School and the Los Gatos Union High School, she began, at Fontaine’s insistence, to learn typing.
Privately, however she had decided to be a teacher. She won a scholarship to Mills College, and intended to go there: but in 1934 an event occurred which was to change her life. The Saratoga Community Theatre, where she had already played the lead in Alice
in Wonderland, offered her the role of
Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The famous Austrian director, Max Reinhardt, was preparing to do his version of the Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. His assistant saw the Saratoga production, met Olivia and invited her to Hollywood.
So that the journey should not seem fruitless she was given the nominal job of understudying Hermia. On the opening night the real Hermia could not appear.
Mills College agreed to keep her scholarship open while she toured with Reinhardt. Warner Bros, meanwhile, decided to go ahead with a film version of the Reinhardt production; but, if Olivia was to be in it, she would have to sign a long-term contract with the studio. At first she refused. However, Reinhardt himself, the executive producer Henry Blanke (who said afterwards: “She was so beautiful it hurt”), co-director William Dieterle and the composer, Erich Korngold, joined forces to persuade her. Eventually she signed, but cried for hours afterwards.
The film was a prestige production, and she enjoyed it. Two assembly-line items to which she was allocated next, but which were actually released earlier, Alibi Ike with Joe E Brown and The Irish in Us with James Cagney (both 1935), disillusioned her; but then came another crucial event.
Warners decided to try their new young actor, Errol Flynn, in the Rafael Sabatini pirate story, Captain Blood, which Robert Donat had turned down. Olivia de Havilland was signed to play opposite him; the pairing proved magical and they would make eight films together. Flynn fell in love with her, but he was recently married, and, though fascinated, she was scared and would not yield.
”It’s a good thing I didn’t,” she said many years later. “He would have ruined my life.”
She was now living in Hollywood with her mother, who encouraged her career. Joan, with acting ambitions of her own, proceeded to join them, having taken her stepfather’s name to avoid confusion. Joan felt, and resented, a lack of family encouragement.
Warners pushed Olivia de Havilland into a rapid succession of varied but exacting roles – costume dramas like Anthony Adverse (1936), comedies liked Dodie Smith’s Call it A Day (1937) and more swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, most memorably The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Dodge City (1939), a Western. Although Robin Hood, in particular, was hugely popular, even she failed to appreciate its classic quality until she saw it again, long afterwards, and declared herself “enchanted by its gaiety and charm”.
Almost every actress in Hollywood wanted to play Scarlett O’hara in David O Selznick’s much-heralded production of Gone with the Wind. Olivia de Havilland, very shrewdly, aimed at Melanie; Joan, who had been considered for Melanie but wanted only Scarlett, recommended her sister, not without malice, for the less interesting role. Jack L Warner, who had consistently rejected Olivia’s pleas for better parts, was unwilling to let her go until she appealed to his wife.
Although the film and her performance were an undoubted triumph, Warner still failed to give her anything worthwhile with which to follow it. She found the script of The
Strawberry Blonde for herself, and again, shrewdly, chose not the title role but the quieter part, enjoying the reunion with James Cagney. Paramount borrowed her for Hold
Back the Dawn (1941). Nominated for an Oscar, she was beaten by her sister. Feeling overworked and underappreciated, she began saving money for a final break with Warners. She made her last film with Errol Flynn, as General Custer’s wife in They Died
With Their Boots On (also 1941).
Her contract with Warners was up, but Jack Warner, irritated by her often last-minute rejection of parts, claimed another six months in compensation for periods when she had been suspended. She resisted, and her lawyer advised that she might be able to use California’s old “anti-peonage” principle which limited contracts of employment to seven years.
Warners responded by blacklisting her throughout Hollywood; for the next two years no studio would touch her. However, she won her case under a ruling which became known as the de Havilland decision.
Poorer by $13,000 but with her prestige enhanced, she made To Each
His Own (1946) for Paramount; it won her an Oscar. In the same year she married Marcus Goodrich, with whom she had fallen in love during a brief theatrical excursion to Connecticut where she starred in James Barrie’s
What Every Woman Knows. Goodrich, 18 years older than Olivia, had been a sailor, journalist, advertising agent, stage manager and the author of quite a celebrated novel, Delilah. He had also, though he neglected to mention it, been married four times previously.
They returned to Hollywood, where his bad temper soon made him unpopular. Joan Fontaine was widely quoted as saying: “It’s too bad that Olivia’s husband has had so many wives and only one book”, which caused Olivia to cut her at the Oscar ceremony. The sisters did not speak to each other for the next five years. Looking back, Olivia de Havilland said afterwards: “It was my stuffy English period. I know now I was too demanding.”
Her career approached its zenith. The Dark Mirror (1946), an ingenious thriller in which she played identical twins, was followed in 1948 by The Snake Pit, a harrowing film about mental illness, and in 1949 by The Heiress, for which, though some said she was too pretty to play Henry James’s heroine, she won both a New York Critics award and another Oscar.
Wanting more time for other things, she deliberately slackened her working pace. Her first child, Benjamin, was born, and the family moved to New York. She was able now, more freely, to try the theatre, first as Juliet with Jack Hawkins playing Mercutio, then as Shaw’s Candide. The results, by common consent, were moderate. In 1952, having started divorce proceedings, she went back to Hollywood for My Cousin Rachel (1952) with Richard Burton. She was admirably philosophical about her career. “One can’t be on top all the time,” she said. “It isn’t natural.”
Invited by the French government to the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, she met Pierre Galante, the editor of Paris Match. Two years later they were married. Olivia de Havilland became, effectively, a rather grand French housewife, settled in Paris, where her daughter Gisèle was born in 1956.
She made occasional films – The Proud Rebel in 1958 with Alan Ladd, Libel with Dirk Bogarde in 1959, and most notably, in 1962, Light in the Piazza, which was filmed in Italy with Olivia giving a delicate performance as the mother of a grown-up daughter who has the mind of a child. She also appeared on the New York stage with Henry Fonda in The Gift of Time, a play about euthanasia which brought her good notices but was too gloomy to be popular.
Her marriage to Galante began to fade. They agreed to continue living adjacently but separately, a civilised arrangement which intrigued the press but endured for 12 years until they were finally divorced; he died in 1998. Her last major film role was in Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964); Joan Crawford had dropped out and Bette Davis (“my only remaining friend in Hollywood,” Olivia de Havilland said) would do it with no one else.
Subsequently there were guest roles in films and television plays. She was stung to death by bees in The Swarm (1978); played the wife of Henry Fonda in Roots: The Next Generation (1979); was the Dowager Empress in a television version of the Anastasia story, for which she won a Golden Globe award as Best Supporting Actress; and, cosily plump by now, played the Queen Mother in a television miniseries The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982).
She was appointed DBE in June 2017, a fortnight before her 101st birthday.
She had written a memoir in 1962, Every Frenchman Has One, about living in France, and made several tours with a lecture entitled “From the City of Stars to the City of Light”, which proved to be much more about Hollywood than Paris. She attended a dinner in 1974, honouring Jack L Warner for his humanitarian achievements.
He admitted that she had “licked him” in her dispute with the studio and that the industry had probably benefited; she said she was “all for humanitarianism” and felt it should be encouraged, “especially in Jack Warner”.
The feud with her younger sister endured until the death of Joan Fontaine at the age of 96 in 2013; even then, it seemed, Joan was determined to have the last word: “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.”
Four years later the siblings’ squabbling was dredged up again in Feud, a television docudrama about the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Portrayed by Catherine Zeta-jones, Olivia de Havilland was seen calling her estranged sister a “bitch”.
For this and other claimed inaccuracies she sued the channel, FX, but lost, having argued with dignity that “studios which choose to chronicle the lives of real people, have a legal and moral responsibility to do so with integrity.”
In later years she was scathing about modern Hollywood and the kind of people who ran it “without elegance or taste”. The judgment was characteristic. Beneath her gentle appearance and manners lay steel, but the steel was tempered by grace. She had accepted vicissitudes with dignity. Her career, which had blossomed seemingly without effort, declined without visible regrets.
The freshness of her early films, even more perhaps than the more serious achievements which followed, remains for her admirers, as it remained for Olivia de Havilland herself, a lastingly happy memory.
Olivia de Havilland’s son predeceased her; she is survived by her daughter.
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Dame Olivia de Havilland, born July 1 1916, died July 26 2020