Olivia de Havilland
Oscar-winning star of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Olivia de Haviland, actor. Born: 1 July, 1916 in Tokyo, Japan. Died: 26 July, 2020 in Paris, France, aged 104
She was one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars and determined off-screen fighters. No one was better suited than Olivia de Havilland to play the sainted Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind or more tenacious about the right to appear in the films of her choosing.
Fans and actors alike owe much to de Havilland, the Oscar-winning performer who became, almost literally, a law unto herself.
De Havilland was one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age. She was beloved to millions as Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, but also won Oscars for To Each His Own and The Heiress and challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system.
During a career that spanned more than 70 years, de Havilland was praised in roles ranging from an unwed mother to a psychiatric inmate in The Snake Pit.
The sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, with whom she had one of Hollywood’s most famous sibling rivalries, de Havilland was the last surviving lead from Gone With the Wind. The 1939 epic, based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Civil War novel and winner of ten Academy Awards, is often ranked as the all-time box office champion (adjusting for inflation), but is now widely condemned for its glorified portrait of slavery and antebellum life.
De Havilland remembered the movie as “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 was otherwise known as Errol Flynn’s co-star in a series of dramas, Westerns and period pieces, most memorably as Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood. But de Havilland also was a prototype for an actress too beautiful for her own good, typecast in romantic roles while desiring greater challenges. Her frustration finally led her to sue Warner Bros in 1943 when the studio tried to keep her under contract after it had expired, claiming she owed six more months because she had been suspended for refusing roles.
Her friend Bette Davis had failed to get out of her contract under similar conditions in the 1930s, but de Havilland prevailed, with the California Court of Appeals ruling that no studio could extend an agreement without the performer’s consent. The decision is still unofficially called the “De Havilland law”.
De Havilland was nominated for an Oscar for Gone With the Wind and went on to earn her own Academy Award in 1946 for To Each His Own, a melodrama about out-of-wedlock birth. A second Oscar came three years later for The Heiress” in which she portrayed a plain homebody (as plain as it was possible to make de Havilland) opposite Montgomery Clift and Sir Ralph Richardson in an adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square.
She moved to Paris in 1953, “at the insistence” of her thenhusband, Frenchman Pierre Galante, she said in 2016. “Hollywood had become a “dismal, tragic place” and she found no reason to return to the US.
“By 1951, television had already made such inroads on the income garnered by motion picture companies that the Golden Era which had prevailed until then was beginning to disintegrate,” she said.
In middle age and after, she appeared in several movies for television, including Roots and Charles and Diana, in which she portrayed the Queen Mother. She also costarred with Davis in the macabre camp classic Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte and was menaced by a young James Caan in the 1964 chiller Lady in a Cage.
In 2009, she narrated a documentary about Alzheimer’s, I Remember Better When I Paint. .
Fitting for one of Hollywood’s most majestic stars, she spent her latter years residing in a town house near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. One reason she liked Paris was because she could walk down the street without being bothered, at least until Gone With the Wind aired on French TV.
In 2008, de Havilland received a National Medal of Arts and two years later was awarded France’s Legion of Honour.
She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of a British patent lawyer, and as an adult openly envied the security she imagined Melanie enjoyed from a happy family life. The actress’ parents separated when she was three, and her mother brought her and her younger sister Joan, to Saratoga, California. De Havilland’s own two marriages, to Galante and to Marcus Goodrich, ended in divorce. She had a child with each of them. She is survived by one of those children, daughter Gisele Galante Chulack, along with son-in-law Andrew Chulack and niece Deborah Dozier Potter.
Her acting ambitions dated back to stage performing at Mills College in Oakland, California. While preparing for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she went to Hollywood to see Max Reinhardt’s rehearsals of the same comedy. She was asked by Reinhardt to read for Hermia’s understudy, stayed with the production through her summer holiday and was given the role in the autumn.
Warner Bros. wanted stage actors for their lavish 1934 production and chose de Havilland to co-star with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck. “I wanted to be a stage actress,” she would recall. “Life sort of made the decision for me.”
By 1935, she had been paired with Flynn in the adventure Captain Blood and she worked with him often over the next decade. Well after much of the public had forgotten such releases as Dodge City and Santa Fe Trail, fans remained obsessed with how well Flynn and de Havilland – one of the screen’s most attractive couples – got along in private life. Flynn was a compulsive womaniser even by Hollywood standards, but de Havilland insisted that her bond with the dashing actor remained, somehow, platonic.
De Havilland said: “We were lovers together so often on the screen that people could not accept that nothing had happened between us.”
She did date Howard Hughes and James Stewart and had an intense affair in the early ’40s with John Huston. Their relationship led to conflict with Davis, her co-star for the Huston-directed In This Our Life; Davis would complain that de Havilland, the supporting actress, was getting more flattering time on camera.
Around the same time, the De Havilland-fontaine feud became public, a conflict aired by the 1941 Oscar race that placed them in competition for best actress. Fontaine was nominated for the Hitchcock thriller Suspicion while de Havilland was cited for Hold Back the Dawn, a drama co-written by Billy Wilder and starring de Havilland as a school teacher wooed by the unscrupulous Charles Boyer.
Asked by a gossip columnist if they ever fought, de Havilland responded, “Of course, we fight. What two sisters don’t battle?” Like a good Warner Bros melodrama, their relationship was a juicy narrative of supposed slights and snubs, from de Havilland reportedly refusing to congratulate Fontaine for winning the Oscar to Fontaine making a cutting crack about de Havilland’s poor choice of agents and husbands. In 2016, de Havilland broke a long silence and referred to her sister as a “dragon lady”. HILLEL ITALIE