High court could hear actress’s complaint
Olivia de Havilland was more than just angry when she learned how she was portrayed in last year’s FX limited series “Feud: Bette and Joan.” The Hollywood legend felt blindsided by the show.
“Mystification and indignation,” the 102-year-old star of “Gone With the Wind,” “The Heiress” and other classic movies recalled feeling in a recent email interview from her home in Paris.
“I was furious. I certainly expected that I would be consulted about the text. I never imagined that anyone would misrepresent me.”
The two-time Oscarwinning actress is refusing to back down in her year-and-a-half-long battle with FX Networks, alleging the 21st Century Fox-owned cable network never obtained her permission and defamed her in the Ryan Murphyproduced limited series depicting the professional rivalry between
Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange).
De Havilland, portrayed by Catherine Zeta-jones, is a supporting character who appears in a handful of scenes.
Despite losing her bids in a California appeals court in March and the state Supreme Court in July, the centenarian star is now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to consider her case. In what has shaped up to be a battle over First Amendment rights, De Havilland is seeking to reverse the appeals-court decision so she can pursue a jury trial.
Defamation disputes are common in Hollywood, where fictionalized dramas depicting real-life people are a staple of TV and films. Movies as recent as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Hurt Locker” have been targeted by the people they portray. But De Havilland is one of the most prominent figures to take a studio to court over the way she was depicted.
De Havilland contends FX violated her own free-speech rights by deliberately misrepresenting her in the series, which first aired in March of last year, as a profane gossip and attributing false words to her — including obscenities aimed at her sister, actress Joan Fontaine.
Though experts say the actress faces an uphill battle because she is a public figure, the major studios are watching the case closely.
A victory for the star would have a serious impact on how they make biopics and other TV shows and films, according to a January filing by the Motion Picture Association of America and Netflix.
The actress was just 27 when she risked her career by suing Warner Bros. in 1943 over her restrictive studio contract. The studio blacklisted her, but she prevailed in a landmark ruling that bears her name — the De Havilland Law, which is still part of the California Labor Code and prohibits the enforcement of personal-services contracts beyond seven years.
Now, De Havilland is proving once again that she is a tenacious studio adversary, even at her advanced age.
“It is essential not to give up in any struggle one undertakes,” De Havilland said.
FX, which declined to comment, also isn’t backing down. Last month it asked the Supreme Court to pass on the case.
De Havilland’s attorneys fired back, arguing that the appeals court’s decision protects “knowing falsehoods about living persons in profitable docudramas.”
The high court could make a decision as early as next month.
At the heart of her dispute with FX is how much liberty docudramas like “Feud” can take when portraying living people.
While the studio contends that dramatizations are protected by the First Amendment, De Havilland is arguing that “Feud” crossed the line.
In real life, De Havilland has said little publicly about Fontaine, who died in 2013, despite gossip that the sisters didn’t always get along. The FX show, De Havilland alleged, damaged her “professional reputation for integrity, honesty, generosity, self-sacrifice and dignity.”
Most legal experts see De Havilland’s case as a long shot.
Eugene Volokh, a professor who teaches free-speech law at the UCLA School of Law, said public figures don’t have exclusive control over their name or likeness.
“They do when it comes to commercial purposes, like advertising,” he said, “but that isn’t the case here.”