LAST OF HER ERA
Golden Age queen dead at 104
NEW YORK: Olivia de Havilland, the last great star of the 1930s, has died at the age of 104.
The two-time Academy Award-winner died of natural causes on Sunday at her home in Paris.
De Havilland rose to stardom during Hollywood’s Golden Age, the period spanning the end of silent films to the late 1950s.
She was the last surviving star of Gone With the Wind, the 1939 classic that recently came under scrutiny for its depiction of slavery in the pre-abolition South. De Havilland was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the movie.
Her death comes just months after that of another Hollywood supra-centenarian, Kirk Douglas, who died aged 103 in February.
Although she was a multiple Oscar winner and appeared in dozens of films, she is most fondly remembered for playing good-girl Melanie Hamilton opposite Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 epic Gone With The Wind.
She also played Maid Marian opposite Errol Flynn in
The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Her two best actress Oscars were for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949).
She emerged from seclusion in France, her home since 1955, to file a lawsuit over her portrayal by Catherine Zeta Jones in the 2017 Emmy-nominated television drama Feud, which chronicled the contentious relationship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
The steely actor famously gave her name to a landmark legal ruling — the de Havilland law — after she took Warner Brothers to court in 1943 over a contract dispute and won, forever loosening the studios’ grip on their actors and actresses.
De Havilland was equally well known for the drama in her personal life, specifically her nearly lifelong feud with sister Joan Fontaine, who died in 2013.
As toddlers (Olivia was older by 15 months) the girls moved with their Britishborn mother from Tokyo, where they were born, to California. The move was prompted by the discovery that their father (who was also British) was having an affair with the maid.
Competitive from childhood, Fontaine claimed in her autobiography that their animosity stemmed from wrestling matches, claiming de Havilland had broken her collarbone.
De Havilland moved to France in 1955 after marrying her second husband, Pierre Galante. She continued to work in movies while raising two children: a daughter, Gisele, her child with Galante; and a son, Benjamin, from her first marriage.