Olivia de Havilland, star of Golden Age Hollywood, dies
Olivia de Havilland, the last remaining star from the 1939 epic film “Gone With the Wind” and a twotime Academy Award winner who for decades was seen as the essence of Hollywood royalty, has died at her residence in Paris. She was 104.
De Havilland, who died Sunday of natural causes, was generally considered the last of the big name actors from the golden age of Hollywood, an era when the studios hummed with activity and the stars seemed larger than life.
The actress — always a free spirit in what then was a buttoned-down world — gave up on Hollywood and moved to Paris in the early 1950s but remained firmly in the public eye into her final years, when she waged a First Amendment fight for privacy over the use of her image in the 2017 docudrama “Feud: Bette and Joan.”
She made headlines on the eve of her 101st birthday by announcing that she was suing FX over what she alleged was the unauthorized use of her identity in the miniseries, which chronicled the storied rivalry between actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Catherine Zeta-Jones portrayed De Havilland in the serial.
“I was furious. I certainly expected that I would be consulted about the text. I never imagined that anyone would misrepresent me,” she told The Times in 2018, adding that the series characterized her as a “vulgar gossip” and a “hypocrite.”
The case was expedited due to De Havilland’s advanced age. Despite early victories, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in early 2019.
Earlier in her career, movie audiences knew De Havilland best as the demure, pretty heroine opposite the dashing Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood” and other popular Warner Bros. costume dramas of the 1930s, including “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
But she won her lead-actress Oscars in more substantial, less flattering roles after leaving Warner Bros. in the mid-1940s.
Her first Oscar came for the 1946 film “To Each His Own,” a World War I-era drama in which she played an unwed mother who lives to regret giving up her young son.