The last Hollywood golden girl
‘GWTW’ legend Olivia de Havilland dies at 104
Hollywood icon Olivia de Havilland — the star of classics including “Gone With the Wind” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” — died Sunday at 104.
The two-time Academy Awardwinning actress died peacefully from natural causes at her home in Paris, where she had lived for more than 60 years, her New York publicist, Lisa Goldberg, said.
Turner Classic Movies also mourned the loss of de Havilland.
“We at TCM are saddened to hear that beloved film icon and one of the last remaining stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Olivia de Havilland has passed away,” the film channel tweeted.
Long considered one of the greats of old Hollywood, de Havilland was also behind a pivotal legal victory in 1944 that forever changed the studio system and the business of moviemaking.
She successfully sued Warner Bros. to stop the studio from tying her to a contract after she refused to accept the roles she was being offered — a liberation still unofficially known as the “De Havilland law.”
De Havilland had turned 104 on July 1 and was the longest surviving star of “Gone With the Wind” — an irony she took delight in given that her Melanie Wilkes was the only major character to die in the film.
Starring alongside Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, she called the 1939 epic “one of the happiest experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”
“It was doing something I wanted to do, playing a character I loved and liked,” she once said.
She won two Oscars — for 1946’s “To Each His Own” and three years later for “The Heiress.” She also received a National Medal of Arts in 2008 and was awarded France’s Legion of Honor in 2010.
De Havilland starred alongside Errol Flynn in a series of movies — most notably as Maid Marian in the beloved swashbuckler “The Adventures of Robin Hood” — but insisted she remained purely professional with the notorious womanizer.
“We were lovers together so often on the screen that people could not accept that nothing had happened between us,” she once recalled.
De Havilland did, however, date eccentric aviator and movie magnate Howard Hughes, and “It’s a Wonderful Life” star James Stewart.
She also had an intense affair in the early 1940s with director John Huston — one that led to a falling out with her friend Bette Davis, who complained that Huston was giving his lover more screen time when the actresses co-starred in his 1942 drama “In This Our Life.”
She married twice — to screenwriter Marcus Goodrich and journalist Pierre Galante — both ending in divorce. She had a son, Benjamin, with Goodrich and a daughter, Giselle, with Galante.
One of her most fractious relationships was with her sister and fellow actress, Joan Fontaine. De Havilland dubbed her “Dragon Lady” and in 1942 they went head-to-head for Best Actress honors at the Oscars. Fontaine won.
Four years later, when de Havilland won for “To Each His Own,” she refused to shake her sister’s hand when Fontaine offered congratulations.
De Havilland once said her memories of Fontaine, who died in 2013, were “multi-faceted, varying from endearing to alienating.”