The Old Un’s Notes
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The Old Un was deeply sad to hear of the death of Dame Olivia de Havilland, the last surviving star of Gone with the Wind.
Dame Olivia, who died at 104, was our Oldie of the Year in 2016 – and was made a Dame – thanks to our TV critic, Roger Lewis.
Roger, working on his Richard Burton biography, tracked her down in 2015 because she’d worked with Burton in My Cousin Rachel (1952).
‘Olivia couldn’t stand the man,’ Roger remembers. ‘She hated the way he openly cheated on his nice wife, Sybil. This was a decade or so before Elizabeth Taylor entered the scene. Olivia’s view was that he was an unscrupulous chancer, coarse, and she enjoyed the way, in My Cousin Rachel, her character got to poison his character.’
So Roger set about asking her to be our Oldie of the Year.
‘I conducted an interview with her by email that lasted weeks,’ he says. ‘When we sent her flowers, the water in the vase had to be Evian.’
Sadly Dame Olivia couldn’t make our Oldie of the Year lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand.
‘She sent a recorded speech – very elaborate syntax, beautifully enunciated,’ Roger remembers. ‘It will be her farewell performance. My one good deed, once I’d helped remind people she was still about, was to get Olivia nominated for her damehood, which was awarded with alacrity, thanks to the intervention of Michael Gove.’
Aged 102 at the time, she was the oldest person ever to appear on an Honours list.
‘Always with her Oscar statuettes on show in the background of any photograph, Dame Olivia de Havilland, who also held the Légion d’honneur, her white hair and bearing immaculate, was more regal than most members of the Royal Family – she was like a duchess in Proust or a Russian princess whose Winter Palace none would dare storm,’ Roger says. ‘Which is to say she was every inch an actress, a star.’
Get your kicks on Route 50! Surely that should be Route 66? No, not since that road was removed from the United States Highway System in 1985.
Route 50 is one of the few remaining two-lane highways running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And David Reynolds, one of the