Olivia de Havilland, the brown-eyed actress adored by millions of others like Santa Melanie Wilkes from “And The Wind Took It,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and off-screen fighter who challenged and unleashed the Hollywood contract system, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She 104.
Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.
De Havilland is among the last most productive artists of the studio era, and the last surviving clue to “Gone With the Wind,” an irony she once noted, because Wilkes, frail and dedicated, the only primary character to die in the film.
The 1939 epic, founded on Margaret Mitchell’s 10-Oscar-winning Civil War bestseller, is rated a Hollywood champion (inflation-adjusted), although she is now widely condemned for her glorious portrayal of slavery and pre-war life.
The height of manufacturer David O. Selznick’s career had a troubled tale off-screen.
Three directors worked on the film, stars Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable were much more connected to the screen than outside, and the fourth star, Leslie Howard, shamelessly disconnected from the role of Melanie’s husband Ashley Wilkes. But de Havilland remembered the film as “one of the happiest accounts of my life. He would do anything I wanted to do, playing with a character I liked and liked.”
During a career that spanned six decades, de Havilland also took on roles ranging from a single mother to a psychiatric inmate at “The Snake Pit,” a non-public favorite. De Havilland, with black hair, projected a comfortable and radiant warmth and a sense of resilience and malice that made her exceptionally attractive, leading critic James Agee to confess that he was “vulnerable to Olivia de Havilland in each and every component of my being, the ulnar nerve. Array.”
She co-starred errol Flynn in a series of dramas, westerns and theatre plays of the era, the most memorable as Maid Marian in “The Adventures of Robin Hood”. But De Havilland is also a prototype for an actress too lovable for her own good, typical in comfortable and romantic roles as she craves greater challenges.
Her frustration eventually led her to sue Warner Bros. in 1943, when the studio tried to keep her under contract after it ended, saying she owed another six months for being suspended for refusing papers. Her friend Bette Davis is among those who failed to terminate her contract in similar situations in the 1930s, but de Havilland won because the California Court of Appeals ruled that no studio can just make a larger deal without the artist’s consent.
The resolution is still informally referred to as the “De Havilland Act”. De Havilland won his own Oscar in 1946 for his functionality in “For Each Of His Own,” a melodrama about birth outside marriage. A moment when Oscar arrived three years later for “The Heiress,” in which she portrayed an undeniable young governess (as transparent as it was imaginable to play Havilland) contradicting Clift and Sir Ralph Richardson in an adaptation of “Washington Square” through Henry JamesArray”In 2008, de Havilland won a National Medal of Arts and was awarded the French Legion of Honor two years later.
She was also famous, not for the better, like Fontaine’s sister, with whom she had a complicated relationship. In a 2016 interview, de Havilland called his past sister “Lady Dragon” and said his memories of Fontaine, who died in 2013, were “multifaceted, ranging from captivating to alienating.”
“On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in the later years, severed,” she said. “Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.”
De Havilland once noted that Melanie Wilkes’ happiness was sustained by a loving and safe family, a blessing that eluded the actress even as a child. She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, to a British patent attorney. Her parents separated when she was 3 years old and her mother took her with her younger sister Joan to Saratoga, California. De Havilland’s two marriages to Marcus Goodrich and Pierre Galante ended in divorce.
Her ambitions as an actress return to the level of 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 for the same comedy. She was invited to read for Hermia’s replacement, took the production on her summer vacation and won the role in the fall.
Warner Bros. sought out theater actors for its luxurious 1935 production and chose de Havilland to co-star with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck. “I tried to be a stage actress,” she recalls. “Life kind of made the resolution for me.”
She signed a five-year contract with the studio and continued to do “Captain Blood”, “Dodge City” and other videos with Flynn, a hopeless womanizer even by Hollywood standards: “Oh, Errol had such magnetism! There was no one who did more than him what he did,” says de Havilland, whose connection to the actor at speed remained, she insisted, unlikely platonic. As she once explained, “we were in love in combination so on screen that other people couldn’t be content with anything happening between us.”
She dated Howard Hughes and James Stewart and had an intense affair in the early 1940s with John Huston. Their encounters led to a confrontation with Davis, his co-host of Huston’s “In This Our Life”; Davis would like de Havilland, a supporting actress in the film, to spend more time and more flattering on camera.
De Havilland would never have reached an agreement with Fontaine, a dispute expanded through the 1941 Oscar race that pitted her sister for the most productive actress. Fontaine was nominated for hitchcock’s mystery “Suspension,” while de Havilland cited it for “Hold the Dawn,” a drama co-written by Billy Wilder and starring De Havilland as a school instructor courted by unscrupulous Charles Boyer.
Asked through a gossip columnist if they ever fought, de Havilland replied: “Of course we’re fighting. Which two sisters don’t fight?” As a clever Warner Bros. soap opera, their courtship was a juicy tale of alleged insults and disagreements, de Havilland refusing to congratulate Fontaine for winning the Oscar at Fontaine by making a crack at The Wrong Selection of Agents and Husbands of Havilland.
Although she has already shot up to 3 photographs a year, her career has slowed down in middle age. She made several television films, adding “Roots” and “Charles and Diana”, in which she portrayed the Queen Mother. She also shared the spotlight with Davis on the macabre harvest of camp “HushArray… Hush, Sweet Charlotte” and threatened through a young James Caan in the 1964 “Lady in a Cage” cooler, condemning his tormentor as “one of the many pieces of offal produced through the welfare state.”
In 2009, she reported a documentary about Alzheimer’s, “I’m bigger when I paint.” Catherine Zeta-Jones played de Havilland in the 2017 FX miniseries about Davis and Joan Crawford, but de Havilland objected to being described as gossip and sued FX. The case is closed.
Despite her chronic stage fright, she did summer stock in Westport, Connecticut, and Easthampton, New York. Moviemaking, she said, produced a different kind of anxiety: “The first day of making a film I feel, ‘Why did I ever get mixed up in this profession? I have no talent; this time they’ll find out.'”