MY LIFE IN 10 Pictures

“I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand.”

— Olivia

Bette Davis had “the career I most admired and that I wanted for myself,” Olivia admitted of her co-star in Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. “She was playing real human beings. It didn’t matter to her if [her characters] were evil or good or both. She would play them with this ferocious honesty.”

1964 SWEET TALK

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Though the killer bee pic The Swarm was “awful,” it gave Olivia one of her most satisfying acting moments — thanks to a death scene with a nosy co-star. “What made me proud when I went to the rushes is that I didn’t move; I could see the bee that was entering my nostril, but I didn’t move!”

1978 ALL ABUZZ

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BORN IN Tokyo to British parents, Olivia Mary de Havilland didn’t find her place until moving to Saratoga, Calif., and discovering she was “quite good” at imitations. “I started with turkeys and donkeys and worked my way on to horses, dogs and cats.” Of course, after being discovered in a local production of a Shakespeare play, she’d prove to be quite an

original, carving a name for herself as an Oscar-winning actress, a feuding foil to younger sister Joan Fontaine and a pioneer whose landmark 1944 lawsuit broke studio control of actors’ careers. As she turns 101 on July 1, Olivia isn’t about to pretend she’s something she’s not — embracing life with what

she calls the three L’s: “love, laughter and light.”

1938 JUST

1 FRIENDS

“We were lovers together so often on the screen that people could not accept that nothing happened between us,” she said of Errol Flynn, her co-star in eight films, including

The Adventures of Robin Hood. “The relationship was not consummated. [The] chemistry was there though. It was there.”

1939 GONE FOR GOOD

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Of her turn as the gracious and gentle Melanie in Gone With the Wind, she admitted, “I would say that she is the person that I would like to be…but also the person that I may never be.”

1945 SISTER ACT

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Her feud with sibling Joan Fontaine became the stuff of film legend. Yet Olivia conceded, “Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multitalented person.”

1948 PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH

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Despite Oscars for 1946’s To Each His Own and 1949’s The Heiress, Olivia was more proud of The Snake Pit, as it changed attitudes “toward mental illness and those suffering from it.”

1953 PARIS

5 MATCH

With the advent of TV, “The Golden Era [of film] was dying and I knew that whatever replaced it would not be its equal.” So Olivia moved to France to marry second husband Pierre Galante and raise Benjamin

(her son with first husband Marcus Goodrich) and daughter Gisele.

1962 STAGE TIME

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She’d eventually start traveling to the U.S. for projects like Broadway’s A Gift of Time with Henry Fonda, whom she respected “as an artist and human being and as a man.”

1986

9 ROLE MODEL

“I think the lack of women’s roles is due to the fact that [people] have some idea of creating a ‘new’ kind of ‘modern’ woman,” lamented Olivia, who’d turn to TV for parts such as her Golden Globe–winning Dowager

Maria in Anastasia: The Mystery of

Anna. “Movies should return to mystiques.”

2008 CLASS ACT

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She’d retired from acting after the 1988 TV movie The Woman He Loved. And Olivia (seen here receiving the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush) doesn’t miss it at all. “Life is too full of events of great importance.”