She won two Academy Awards for Best Actress and a treasure trove of Hollywood Awards. But for most moviegoers, Olivia de Havilland, who died at 104, will always be associated with the role for which she narrowly lost the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1940.
The movie was gone With the WindThe role was kind and warm Melanie Hamilton, suffering for others forever, and the rival who took the prize was Hattie McDaniel, the film’s co-star and the first black woman to win an Oscar.
De Havilland has become a typewriter in memory as an interpreter specializing in gracefully distressed kindness. She played a variant of Melanie in the role that earned the actress her second Oscar in 1949, The heiress (based on Henry James’ Washington Square) But before that he demonstrated his skill and versatility in To each his own (1946), earning her first best actress Oscar in a heavily written drama of love and war, and The Snake Pit (1948), a powerful performance in a movie about mental illness.
De Havilland as the kind and warm Melanie Hamilton in ‘Gone with the Wind’ © Selznick / Mgm / Kobal / Shutterstock
From the mid-1950s, De Havilland entered a partial and then virtual retirement © Thibault Camus / AP
In the mid-1940s, De Havilland made Hollywood history with a lawsuit against Warner Brothers that set a precedent for studio actor independence and the end of “slave contracts.” (In her later years, ironically, de Havilland was one of the few surviving actresses celebrated as living paradigms of the great era of studio cinema.)
De Havilland had come to America almost by accident. She was born in Tokyo, on July 1, 1916, to English parents. Her father was a patent attorney. Aviation pioneer Geoffrey De Havilland was a cousin. When Olivia was three years old, her younger sister Joan, later known as actress Joan Fontaine, accompanied her and her mother, later divorced, to settle in Saratoga, California.
De Havilland in ‘The Snake Pit’ in 1948 © Moviestore / Shutterstock
When Warner Bros continued to put her in primary or pale roles of love interest, de Havilland complained that her talents were being underutilized © Hulton Archive / Getty
She was rescued from anonymity at the age of 19, when she was still a schoolgirl, by producer and director Max Reinhardt, who cast her on stage and then portrayed her as Hermia in Summer night Dream (1935) That caught the attention of Warner Brothers and began a remarkable 40-year film career.
De Havilland’s success in Summer night Dream it earned him a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, that meant a prolific, at some points seemingly endless, on-screen association with cloak-and-dagger actor Errol Flynn (later revealed to be a 15th cousin eliminated two times). They made eight movies together, from Captain Blood (1935) a They died with their boots on (1941), a sequence whose only notable interruption was gone With the Wind, for which De Havilland was loaned to producer David O Selznick.
The epic of romance and action, based on Margaret Mitchell’s book, made her a star, although Warner took longer to recognize this than de Havilland. When the studio continued to put her in primitive or pale roles of love interest, the actress complained that her talents were being underutilized.
Threatening to wait for better parts, she was put on hold for six months. When the studio asked her to serve those months at the end of her contract, the actress sued and won. The “De Havilland Decision” meant that no studio could extend a contract based on previous suspensions. The case was credited as the basis for a new era of actors’ voting rights.
De Havilland with his sister Joan Fontaine. Their bad relationship remained a Hollywood mystery © General Photographic Agency / Getty
De Havilland receives an Academy Award for Best Actress for ‘To Each His Own’ by actor Ray Milland © Keystone / Getty
From the mid-1950s, De Havilland entered a partial and then virtual retirement. She married Paris Match journalist and editor Pierre Galante, and settled in Paris. After her last leading roles (Lady in a cage in 1962 and Silence . . Silence Sweet Charlotte in 1963), celebrity cameos became his work on the main screen: Airport ’77 (1977) and The swarm (1978) In 1962, he wrote a well-reviewed memoir, with comical observations on life in Paris, called Every Frenchman has one.
The great and permanent mystery in de Havilland’s life continued to be his relationship, or the lack of one, with his sister Joan. Although some dated the departure of the year in which Joan beat Olivia to win her first and only best actress Oscar, for Suspicion (1941), no one has been sure why the two sisters refused to speak to each other, reportedly for more than 60 years. The sisters themselves did not speak either.
Olivia de Havilland had a son, Benjamin, with her first husband, the novelist Marcus Goodrich, whom she married in 1946 and divorced in 1953. Benjamin was a distinguished mathematician and died of Hodgkins disease in 1991.
De Havilland is survived by his daughter with Goodrich, Gisele, who became a journalist.
