Olivia de Havilland, the bulging-eyed actress adored through millions of others such as Saint Melanie Wilkes from “Gone with the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and off-screen wrestler who challenged and unleashed Hollywood’s contract system, died Sunday. at his home in Paris. She’s 104.
Oscar winner Joan Fontaine’s sister Havilland died peacefully from herbal causes, New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.
De Havilland, one of the last most productive on-screen artists of the studio era, and the last surviving protagonist of “Gone with the Wind”, an irony, once noted, because Wilkes, fragile and devoted, the only main character to die in the film.
The 1939 epic, founded on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling 10-oscar-winning civil war novel, is classified as a Hollywood champion in the workplace (adjusted for inflation), though she is now widely condemned for her glorified interpretation of slavery and life before the war. . Training
The pinnacle of the career of the manufacturer David O. Selznick, had a problematic story off-screen.
Three administrators 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, brabably detached from the role of Melanie’s husband, Ashley Wilkes. But de Havilland remembered the film as “one of the happiest stories of my life. He did everything he sought to do, betting on a character he enjoyed and enjoyed.”
During a career that lasted six decades, De Havilland also assumed roles ranging from a single mother to a psychiatric inmate in “The Snake Pit,” a non-public favorite. De Havilland’s black hair projected a soft, radiant warmth and a sense of stamina and malice that made her unusually attractive, leading the critic James Agee to admit that she was “vulnerable to Olivia de Havilland in each and every component of my ulnar self. Nerve. Fixed “
She co-starred errol Flynn in a series of dramas, westerns and works of the time, the most memorable as Maid Marian in “The Adventures of Robin Hood”. But De Havilland is also a prototype actress too charming for her own good, typical in comfortable and romantic roles while yearning for greater challenges.
Her frustration eventually led to her suing Warner Bros. in 1943 when the studio tried to keep her under contract after it expired, saying she owed another six months because she had been suspended for rejecting papers. Her friend Bette Davis, among those who did not terminate her contract in similar situations in the 1930s, however, De Havilland won, as the California Court of Appeals ruled that no studio can simply make a larger deal without the artist’s consent.
The resolution is still informally known as the “De Havilland Act”. De Havilland won his own Oscar in 1946 for his performance in “To Each His Own”, a melodrama about birth out of wedlock. A moment Oscar arrived here three years later for “The Heiress,” in which she played an undeniable young housekeeper (as transparent as it was imaginable to do de Havilland) against 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 Honour 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 sister “Dragon Lady” and said that his memories of Fontaine, who died in 2013, were “multifaceted, ranging from friendly to alienating.”
“For me, he was loving, but infrequently he broke up and, in recent years, he cut himself,” he said. “Dragon Lady, like me in spite of everything I made the decision to call her, was a brilliant and multifaceted person, but with an astigmatism in her faith in other people and occasions that occasionally made her react unfairly and even harmfully.”
De Havilland once observed that Melanie Wilkes’ happiness rested on a loving and secure family, a blessing the actress eluded even as a child. She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of a British patent attorney. Her parents separated when she was 3 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,” he went to Hollywood to watch Max Reinhardt’s essays for the same comedy. She was asked to read for Hermia’s understudy, took production on her summer vacation and won the role in the fall.
Warner Bros. He sought out stage actors for his luxurious 1935 production and chose De Havilland to co-star with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck. “I wanted to be a stage actress,” she recalls. “The kind of life took the resolution for me.”
She signed a five-year contract with the studio and continued to make “Captain Blood,” “Dodge City” and other videos with Flynn, a desperate womanizer even through Hollywood standards. “Oh, Errol had so much magnetism! There was no one to do more than him what he did,” says de Havilland, whose connection to the speedy actor remained, he insisted, improbablely platonic. As he once explained, “We were in love together, so on the screen other people couldn’t settle for nothing happening between us.”
He dated Howard Hughes and James Stewart and had an intense affair in the early 1940s with John Huston. His relationship led to a confrontation with Davis, his co-star in Huston’s “In This Our Life”; Davis would say that De Havilland, the supporting actress for the film, spends more time and flattering in front of the camera.
De Havilland would never have reached an agreement with Fontaine, an amplified dispute through the 1941 Oscar race that pitted her against her opposed to her sister for the most productive actress. Fontaine nominated for hitchcock’s mystery “Suspect”, while De Havilland cited by “Hold Back the Dawn”, a drama co-written by Billy Wilder and starring De Havilland as a school instructor courted by the unscrupulous Charles Boyer.
When asked through a gossip columnist if they ever got into a fight, De Havilland replied: “Of course we’re fighting. That two sisters don’t fight?” As a smart soap opera by Warner Bros., his quotes were a juicy tale of alleged insults and snubs, and De Havilland refused to congratulate Fontaine on winning the Oscar at Fontaine and mocked the wrong selection of agents and husbands of De Havilland.
Although he has already filmed up to 3 photographs a year, his career has slowed in middle age. She made several television films, adding “Roots” and “Charles and Diana”, in which she played the Queen Mother. He also shared the spotlight with Davis in the macabre vintage camp “HushArray.. Hush, Sweet Charlotte” and threatened through a young James Caan in the 1964 refrigerator “Lady in a Cage”, condemning her torturer as “one of the many pieces offal produced through the welfare state.”
In 2009, he recounted a documentary about Alzheimer’s disease, “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 opposed being described as gossip and sued FX. The case has been closed.
Despite his chronic nervousness, he made summer moves in Westport, Connecticut and Easthampton, New York. Film, he said, has produced another kind of anxiety: “The first day of filming a movie, I feel, ‘Why did I worry about this business? I have no talent; this time, they’re going to locate him.'”