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Olivia de Havilland, Hollywood Golden Age Star Actress, Dead at Age 104


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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/olivia-de-havilland-two-time-oscar-winner-and-last-surviving-star-of-gone-with-the-wind-dies-at-104/2020/07/26/bbf150da-cf57-11ea-8d32-1ebf4e9d8e0d_story.html

 

Olivia De Havilland was the last of surviving star of Gone with the Wind.  She played Melanie in the movie, the cousin of Scarlet O'Hara who was the rival for Ashley Wilkes.  She was also well known for her roles with Errol Flynn.  With her and Kirk Douglas gone, the Golden Age of Hollywood has lost its last stars.

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Olivia de Havilland, a Hollywood actress who was the last surviving star of “Gone With the Wind,” won two Academy Awards for roles that drastically downplayed her beauty, and risked her career to successfully challenge punitive film-industry labor laws, died July 26 at her home in Paris. She was 104.

 

Her publicist, Lisa Goldberg, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Ms. de Havilland was the older sister of Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine, with whom she had one of the longest sibling rivalries and feuds in the film colony. The roots of the estrangement were never made clear publicly, but the rift has at times been attributed to professional competition that may have even been stoked by their mother.

Ms. de Havilland’s ascent to stardom came at whiplash-inducing speed. She was 18 and aspiring to a stage career when she was plucked from obscurity to play Hermia in theater impresario Max Reinhardt’s celebrated 1934 Hollywood Bowl production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Reinhardt also cast her in the 1935 film version of the Shakespeare fantasy, which also starred James Cagney and Mickey Rooney.

 
 

She signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros., the studio making the film, and began her rise as a dewy-eyed ingénue in swashbuckling action films co-starring Errol Flynn.

 

She was paired nine times with Flynn, notably in “Captain Blood” as a haughty aristocrat attracted to a rebellious pirate, “The Adventures of Robin Hood” as Maid Marian, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936) as the love interest of two British lancers in India.

As an actress, Ms. de Havilland felt confined by the studio’s risk-averse casting decisions. “I had no real opportunity to develop and to explore difficult roles,” she told the American Academy of Achievement in 2006, “and that was tiresome.”

 

In 1938, she got a call from independent producer David O. Selznick, who was preparing to make “Gone With the Wind,” a Civil War epic based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Meeting with him secretly, she tested for the role of the modest and virtuous Melanie Hamilton.

 

For “Gone With the Wind,” Ms. de Havilland received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress but lost to Hattie McDaniel, who played the servant Mammy in the film. Leigh won the Oscar for best actress, but critic and filmmaker Pare Lorentz, writing in McCall’s magazine, described Ms. de Havilland as almost having stolen the movie from its star with a performance that was “mature, charming and flawless.”

 

 

Bucking the studio system

After the Oscar nomination, Ms. de Havilland continued to be dissatisfied with the roles Warner offered her.

Like the outspoken and strong-willed Warner Bros. actress Bette Davis, she was suspended for refusing roles she deemed unworthy of her skills. In the late 1930s, Davis lost a lawsuit challenging the studio strictures but reached an agreement for better roles; Warner had an interest in extinguishing the fire.

Ms. de Havilland remained determined to break the studio’s strong-arm techniques. “There’s too much of the factory attitude around a studio,” she told an interviewer in 1940, three years before filing her suit. “Not that the bosses can be wholly blamed, because a picture to them is just one of 50 or so to be turned out in a season. But to the actress, that particular picture is her life at the moment. It commands all her attention, but maybe only one-fiftieth of the producer’s.”

 

In what became a 1945 landmark contract ruling known as “the de Havilland decision,” her attorneys used California anti-peonage statutes to support the actress’s case that a seven-year contract was limited to seven calendar years rather than time spent working. That was an important distinction when studios routinely suspended performers and did not count that suspension period as time under contract.

 

 
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