Olivia de Havilland was celebrated for her role in “Gone with the Wind,” but when it came to her relationship with her sister, actress Joan Fontaine, she had also left with relatives.
Look, the Hollywood icon that portrayed sweet, doomed Melanie was actually a fighter.
De Havilland, who died Sunday a few weeks after her 104th birthday, not only held a grudge against Fontaine because the latter won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1942, in a category for which they were both nominated. Their sibling rivalry began many years earlier and was their greatest battle, aided by de Havilland’s notorious spiteful personality.
That fighting spirit emerged more recently when, at 102, he sued FX for unauthorized use of his identity in the 2017 series “Feud: Bette and Joan.” The Supreme Court declined to hear her case in 2019. (However, it did open avenues for actresses through their contentious contract battles with film studios around the 1930s.)
‘I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister, Joan, since she doesn’t have any.’
– Olivia de Havilland
But back to the sister’s fractured act: De Havilland and Fontaine, the latter of whom died at age 96 in 2013, were born just a year apart, with De Havilland being the older brother. Fontaine reportedly once said, “I don’t remember a single act of kindness from Olivia throughout my childhood. I hated the idea of having a brother so much that he didn’t come near my crib. ”
The apparent root of the problem: When her mother remarried after her father left the family to return to her lover, Fontaine quickly approached her new stepfather, George Fontaine, who de Havilland never liked. Unlike de Havilland, Fontaine became more open to discussing her rivalry, and in her 1978 autobiography “No Bed of Roses,” she also attributed the problem to de Havilland’s resentment for sharing parents’ attention with a brother.
At age 9, de Havilland received a school assignment to write a will and a last dummy wish. “I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister, Joan, since she has none,” he allegedly wrote. Later, it only got worse when Fontaine received an offer for the role of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in the now controversial “Gone with the Wind,” but she recommended De Havilland.
“I made a tremendous mistake and have always regretted it,” Fontaine recalled in his memoirs. “Because it was George Cukor [who initially directed the film]He was wearing quite elegant clothes. He said, ‘Oh, you’re too fancy for the role I want you to play.’ And I said, ‘Well, what about my sister?’ And he said, ‘Who is your sister?’ I explained. And he said, “Thank you.” And that’s how Olivia got that role. “(De Havilland, for her part, told the Hollywood Reporter that Cukor called her and asked if she would be willing to read from Melanie, even though she was under contract with Warner Bros., to see if it would work for the role.)
In 1940, De Havilland was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for that performance, and she never recognized her little sister for the momentum.
Hatred even manifested physically. In 1933, for example, 17-year-old De Havilland broke one of Fontaine’s clavicles by pushing it over a pool and jumping over it. De Havilland, then an amateur actress who had landed roles in Shakespeare’s plays, would later lose the 1942 Best Actress Oscar for Fontaine, who won for her role in the Alfred Hitchcock film “Suspicion”.
“Oh my gosh,” Havilland reportedly thought after Fontaine’s name was announced as the winner. “I have lost prestige with my own sister. And it was true, she was arrogant towards me after that. ”
As for Fontaine, he revealed in his book: “My paralysis was total. I felt Olivia jump on the table and grab my hair.
But de Havilland would eventually have his moment in the sun, even though it was awkward and that the photographers captured. In 1946, he won an Oscar for “Each One His Own,” but when Fontaine offered a hand in congratulations, de Havilland refused to take it.
“I went to congratulate her as I would have with any winner,” Fontaine later wrote. “She looked at me, ignored my hand, grabbed her Oscar and walked away.”
“For my part, he was always loving, but sometimes separated and, in recent years, cut,” de Havilland once said of their relationship. “The Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant and multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events that often made her react in an unfair and even damaging way.”
De Havilland left Hollywood and moved to France in the 1950s, spending the rest of his life in Paris. In 1975 her mother died and de Havilland attempted to block Fontaine from attending the memorial service. Fontaine threatened to go to the media with this news, and then received an invitation, although they were ignored during the service. The only contact they had that day: de Havilland passed her mother’s urn to Fontaine so that she could collect and scatter a handful of her ashes.
By 1979, the relationship had apparently worsened. That year, they both attended the Oscars and sat at opposite ends of the stage. In 1989, the two discovered that they were guests at the same Beverly Hills hotel at the same time, especially in adjacent rooms. Fontaine left immediately.
However, despite years of these documented disputes, Fontaine told the Hollywood Reporter in 2013 that the two sisters had never had a difficult patch.
“Let me say that Olivia and I have never had a fight,” he told the publication. “We have never had any dissatisfaction. We have never had harsh words. And all this is press.
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