Hollywood legend Olivia de Havilland dead at 104
Two-time Oscar winner had long-lasting legacy both on and off screen.
Olivia de Havilland, an actress who gained movie immortality in “Gone With the Wind,” then built an illustrious film career punctuated by a successful fight to loosen studios’ grip on contract actors, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104 and one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s fabled Golden Age.
De Havilland was both a classic Hollywood beauty and an honoured screen actress whose very name and bearing suggested membership in a kind of aristocracy of moviedom. Although she was typecast early in her career as the demure ingénue, she went on to earn meatier roles that led to five Academy Award nominations, two of which brought her the Oscar, for “To Each His Own” (1946) and “The Heiress” (1949).
Those roles came to her in no small part because of the resolve she showed when she stood up to the studios and won a battle that helped push Hollywood into the modern era, surprising the movie moguls, who may not have expected such steel in an actress so softly attractive and, at fivefoot-three, so unintimidatingly petite.
She had shown similar grit a decade earlier, in her breakthrough role, when she held her own against her formidable co-stars — Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard — in 1939’s “Gone With the Wind.”
De Havilland’s performance as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes led to an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress, though the award went to another member of the cast, Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, Scarlett’s housekeeper.
De Havilland was under contract to Warner Bros. when the film’s original director, George Cukor, working for MGM, invited her to audition for the role of Melanie. (He was later replaced by Victor Fleming.) After getting the part, she had to plead with her studio boss, Jack Warner, to lend her to the MGM production.
By then she had established herself at Warner as a familiar heroine in some 20 films. Most notable was a string of action features and costume dramas opposite Errol Flynn, among them “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), in which she played Maid Marian.
Warner had signed de Havilland to a seven-year contract in 1935 on the strength of her performance that year as Hermia, the defiant daughter who resists an arranged marriage, in Max Reinhardt’s film adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” After her success in “Gone With the Wind,” de Havilland returned to Warner with the expectation of more challenging roles. For the most part, they did not materialize.
One exception was “Hold Back the Dawn” (1941), in which she played an American schoolteacher who is seduced in Mexico by a wily European exile (Charles Boyer). Her performance earned her another Oscar nomination, but this time she lost to her sister, Joan Fontaine, who won for “Suspicion.” The two were rarely on speaking terms after that.
The formula roles kept coming. When de Havilland complained, she was told that she had been hired because she photographed well and that she wasn’t required to act.
The studio had misread her determination. She began to refuse roles she considered inferior. Warner retaliated by suspending her several times, for a total of six months, and, after her contract expired, insisting that because of the suspensions she was still the studio’s property for six more months.
De Havilland sued. The case dragged on for a year and a half, but David finally beat Goliath when the California Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling in her favour in 1945. What became known as the de Havilland decision established that a studio could not arbitrarily extend the duration of an actor’s contract.
When she resumed her career, de Havilland appeared in four films in rapid succession, all released in 1946. She soon took on one of her most demanding roles, that of a young bride who becomes mentally ill and is sent to an institution, in “The Snake Pit” (1948). The film was an unflinching study of mental illness and the treatments available then, from narcotics to electroshock. De Havilland was nominated for a best actress Oscar, but did not win.
She captured her second Oscar the next year with “The Heiress,” directed by William Wyler and adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from their Broadway play based on Henry James’ “Washington Square.” De Havilland presented an affecting portrait of a repressed, spinsterish young woman dominated by her rigidly protective father (Ralph
Richardson).
It was one of de Havilland’s favourite roles. “The films I loved,” she said in 1964, “the great loves, are ‘The Snake Pit,’ ‘The Heiress’ and, of course, ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ”
But she did not love Hollywood, and in the 1950s she startled the town when she abandoned it to live in Paris with a new husband, though she kept her U.S. citizenship.
“For Olivia,” William Stadiem wrote in a profile of her in Vanity Fair magazine in 2016, “there was a whiff of decay and disappointment about Hollywood.”
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born July 1, 1916, to British parents in Tokyo. In 1919, her mother, the former Lillian Ruse, moved with Olivia and Joan, her younger sister by 15 months, to Saratoga, Calif. The de Havillands divorced, and Lillian married George Fontaine, a department store executive, whose surname Joan later took as her stage name.
Olivia de Havilland was married twice. Both marriages ended in divorce. The first, in 1946, was to Marcus Aurelius Goodrich; they had a son, Benjamin, and divorced in 1952. She married Pierre Galante in 1955 after the couple met in France. They moved to Paris, had a daughter, Gisele, and divorced in 1979. De Havilland’s son died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1991. She is survived by her daughter, Giselle Galante Chulack.