Olivia de Havilland
Oscar-winner and star of Hollywood’s golden era who shone in ‘Gone with the Wind’
OLIVIA de Havilland, who has died aged 104, was an unforgettable star from Hollywood’s golden era.
She had a gentle beauty which lit up roles such as Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Melanie in Gone with the Wind
(1939). In a famous clash with Jack Warner, she exhibited a steely firmness, but she was most fondly remembered for her roles in swashbuckling adventure stories. A highly publicised tiff with her sister Joan Fontaine spluttered throughout their lives.
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, 16 months before her sister Joan. Their parents were English. Walter Augustus de Havilland taught at the Imperial University; his wife Lillian had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and took on a few pupils, including her own daughters.
In 1919 it was decided that the two girls, whose health seemed poor, should be taken back to England. However, as they recuperated in San Francisco, Mrs de Havilland took a house in Saratoga, which she liked so much that she decided not to continue the journey. Walter de Havilland stayed in Japan and they divorced in 1925. Lilian married George Milan Fontaine, a local shopkeeper, the same year.
At the age of 16, Olivia moved out of the house to live with friends. She won a scholarship to Mills College, and intended to go there, but in 1934 an event occurred which was to change her life. The Saratoga Community Theatre, where she had already played the lead in Alice in Wonderland, offered her the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Austrian director Max Reinhardt was preparing to do his version of the Dream
at the Hollywood Bowl. His assistant saw the Saratoga production, met Olivia, and invited her to Hollywood.
Warner Bros decided to go ahead with a film version of the Reinherdt production; but, if Olivia was to be in it, she would have to sign a long-term contract with the studio. Eventually she signed, but cried for hours afterwards.
The film was a prestige production, and she enjoyed it. Two assembly line items disillusioned her, but then came another crucial event. Warner decided to try its new young actor, Errol Flynn, in the pirate story Captain Blood,
with de Havilland signed to play opposite him. The pairing proved magical; Flynn fell in love with her, but he was recently married, and, though fascinated, she was scared and would not yield. “It’s a good thing I didn’t,” she said many years later. “He would have ruined my life.”
Warner pushed de Havilland into a rapid succession of varied, but exacting, roles and more swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, most memorably The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Dodge City.
Almost every actress in Hollywood wanted to play Scarlett O’Hara in David O Selznick’s much-heralded production of Gone with the Wind (1939). De Havilland, shrewdly, aimed at Melanie; Joan, who had been considered for Melanie but wanted only Scarlett, recommended her sister, not without malice, for the less interesting role. Jack Warner was unwilling to let Olivia go until she appealed to his wife.
Paramount borrowed her for Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Nominated for an Oscar, she was beaten by her sister.
Her contract with Warner was up, but Jack Warner claimed another six months in compensation. She resisted, and her lawyer advised that she use California’s old “anti-peonage” principle which limited contracts of employment to seven years.
Warner Bros responded by blacklisting her throughout Hollywood. However, she won her case under a ruling which became known as the ‘de Havilland decision’. Poorer by $13,000 but with her prestige enhanced, she made To Each his Own (1946) for Paramount. It won her an Oscar. In the same year, she married Marcus Goodrich.
Her career approached its zenith and in The Heiress
(1949) she won both a New York Critics award and another Oscar. Her first child, Benjamin, was born, and the family moved to New York. In 1952, having started divorce proceedings, she went back to Hollywood. Invited by the French government to the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, she met Pierre Galante, the editor of Paris Match. Two years later they were married and her daughter Gisele was born in 1956.
Her marriage to Galante began to fade and they were finally divorced in 1979. Subsequently there were guest roles in various films and TV plays. She was the Dowager Empress in a TV version of the Anastasia story, for which she won a Golden Globe award as Best Supporting Actress.
The feud with her sister endured until the death of Joan Fontaine in December 2013.
Latterly, de Havilland was scathing about modern Hollywood and the kind of people who ran it “without elegance or taste”. The judgment was characteristic. Beneath her gentle appearance and manners lay steel, but the steel was tempered by grace. Olivia de Havilland’s son predeceased her; she is survived by her daughter.