Olivia de Havilland
| Olivia de Havilland | |
|---|---|
 de Havilland as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939) |
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| Born | Olivia Mary de Havilland July 1, 1916 Tokyo, Japan |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1935–present |
| Spouse | Marcus Goodrich (m. 1946–1953) (divorced) 1 child Pierre Galante (m. 1955–1979) (divorced) 1 child |
Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1, 1916) is a British American film and stage actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946 and in 1949. She is the elder sister of actress Joan Fontaine. Along with her sister, de Havilland is one of the last surviving female stars from 1930s Hollywood. She is also the last living lead cast member from Gone with the Wind.
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Early life
Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan to English parents. Her mother, Lilian Augusta Ruse (1886–1975), was an actress known professionally as Lillian Fontaine, and her father, Walter Augustus de Havilland (1872–1968), was a patent attorney with a practice in Japan.[1][2] Her parents married in 1914 and divorced in 1919. Her younger sister is actress Joan Fontaine (born 1917), from whom she has been estranged for many decades, not speaking at all since 1975.[3]
The de Havilland family moved from Tokyo when she was two years old, settling in Saratoga, California, due to her sister's poor health, which improved after the family emigrated. Both sisters attended Los Gatos High School and Olivia also attended the Notre Dame High School, Belmont.[4] An acting award at Los Gatos is named after her. Her paternal cousin is Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, designer of the de Havilland Mosquito aeroplane.
Career
De Havilland appeared as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, her first stage production, at the Hollywood Bowl. The stage production was later turned into a 1935 movie, her film debut.[5] Although the stage cast was largely replaced with Warner Bros. contract players, she was hired to reprise her role as Hermia. After appearing with Joe E. Brown in Alibi Ike and James Cagney in The Irish in Us, she played opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films as Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and as Maid Marian to Flynn's Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Overall, she starred opposite Flynn in eight films.
She played Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. In 1941, de Havilland became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She was becoming increasingly frustrated by the roles assigned to her. She felt she had proven herself capable of playing more than the demure ingénues and damsels in distress that were quickly typecasting her, and began to reject scripts that offered her this type of role. When her Warner Bros. contract expired, the studio informed her that six months had been added to it for times she had been on suspension; the law then allowed for studios to suspend contract players for rejecting a role and the period of suspension to be added to the contract period. In theory, this allowed a studio to maintain indefinite control over an uncooperative contractee.
Most accepted this situation, while a few tried to change the system. Bette Davis had mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against Warner Bros. in the 1930s. De Havilland mounted a lawsuit in the 1940s, supported by the Screen Actors Guild and was successful, thereby reducing the power of the studios and extending greater creative freedom to the performers. The decision was one of the most significant and far-reaching legal rulings in Hollywood. Her victory won her the respect and admiration of her peers, among them her own sister Joan Fontaine who later commented, "Hollywood owes Olivia a great deal".[6] The studio, however, vowed never to hire her again. The California Court of Appeal's ruling came to be informally known, and is still known to this day, as the De Havilland Law (California Labor Code Section 2855).[7] It imposes a 7 year limit on contracts for service unless the employee agrees to an extension beyond that term.
Following the release of Devotion, a Hollywood biography of the Brontë sisters filmed in 1943 but withheld from release during the suspension and litigation, de Havilland signed a three picture deal with Paramount Pictures. The quality and variety of her roles began to improve. James Agee, in his review for The Dark Mirror (1946), noted the change, and stated that although she had always been "one of the prettiest women in movies", her recent performances had proven her acting ability. He commented that she did not possess "any remarkable talent, but her playing is thoughtful, quiet, detailed and well-sustained ... [a]nd an undivided pleasure to see."[8] She won Best Actress Academy Awards for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), and was also widely praised for her Academy Award–nominated performance in The Snake Pit (1948). This was one of the earliest films to attempt a realistic portrayal of mental illness, and de Havilland was lauded for her willingness to play a role that was completely devoid of glamor and that confronted such controversial subject matter. She won the New York Film Critics Award for both The Snake Pit and The Heiress.
De Havilland appeared sporadically in films after the 1950s and attributed this partly to the growing permissiveness of Hollywood films of the period. She declined the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, allegedly citing the unsavory nature of some elements of the script and saying there were certain lines she could not allow herself to speak. De Havilland denied this in a 2006 interview, saying she had recently given birth to her son when offered the role, which had been a life altering experience, and was unable to relate to the material.[9] The role went to her Gone with the Wind co-star, Vivien Leigh, who won her second Academy Award for her role. De Havilland continued acting on film until the late 1970s, afterward continuing her career on television until the late 1980s, highlighted by her winning a Golden Globe and earning a Emmy Award nomination for her performance as the Dowager Empress Maria in the 1986 miniseries Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna.
In 2008, de Havilland was awarded the United States National Medal of Arts.
Personal life
Relationships
De Havilland and Errol Flynn were known as one of Hollywood's most exciting on-screen couples, appearing in eight films together, but contrary to salacious rumours, were never linked romantically. The films in which they co-starred included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood and Four's a Crowd (1938), Dodge City and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940) and They Died with Their Boots On (1941).
De Havilland stated, "He never guessed I had a crush on him. And it didn't get better either. In fact, I read in something that he wrote that he was in love with me when we made The Charge of the Light Brigade the next year, in 1936. I was amazed to read that, for it never occurred to me that he was smitten with me, too, even though we did all those pictures together." However, in an interview cited on Turner Classic Movies[10] de Havilland claims she knew the crush was reciprocal and further states that Flynn proposed, though de Havilland turned down the proposal as Flynn was at the time still married to actress Lili Damita.
Marriages
De Havilland married novelist Marcus Goodrich in 1946 and they divorced in 1953. Their son, Benjamin (born in 1949) became a mathematician and died in 1991 after a long battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was married to French journalist and Paris Match editor Pierre Galante between 1955 until 1979. Their daughter, Giselle (who later became a journalist) was born in July 1956 when de Havilland was 40.[11] After the divorce, de Havilland and Galante remained on good terms, and she nursed him through his final illness (lung cancer) in Paris, which was the stated reason for her absence from the 70th anniversary of the Oscars in 1998.
Later years
De Havilland was good friends with Bette Davis with whom she starred with in Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), It's Love I'm After (1937), and In This Our Life (1942). She still remains a close friend of actress Gloria Stuart. In April 2008, she attended the Los Angeles funeral of Charlton Heston. In 2008, she was a surprise guest at the Centennial Tribute to Bette Davis.
Sibling rivalry
Of the two sisters, Olivia was the first to become an actress; when Joan tried to follow her lead, their mother, who allegedly favored Olivia, refused to let her use the family name, so Joan was forced to invent a name, taking first Joan Burfield, and later Joan Fontaine. Biographer Charles Higham records that the sisters have always had an uneasy relationship, starting in early childhood when Olivia would rip up the clothes Joan had to wear as hand-me-downs, forcing Joan to sew them back together. A lot of the feud and resentment between the sisters allegedly stems from Joan's perception of Olivia being their mother's favorite child.[12]
Both Olivia and Joan were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1942. Joan won first for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) over Olivia's performance in Hold Back the Dawn. Charles Higham states that Joan "felt guilty about winning given her lack of obsessive career drive...". Higham has described the events of the awards ceremony, stating that as Joan stepped forward to collect her award, she pointedly rejected Olivia's attempts at congratulating her and that Olivia was both offended and embarrassed by her behavior. Several years later, Olivia would remember the slight and exact her own revenge by brushing past Joan, who was waiting with her hand extended, because Olivia had allegedly taken offense at a comment Joan had made about Olivia's husband. Olivia's relationship with Joan continued to deteriorate after the two incidents. Charles Higham has stated that this was the near final straw for what would become a lifelong feud, but the sisters did not completely stop speaking to each other until 1975. According to Joan, Olivia did not invite her to a memorial service for their mother, who had recently died. Olivia claims she told Joan, but that Joan had brushed her off, claiming that she was too busy to attend.
Charles Higham records that Joan has an estranged relationship with her own daughters as well, possibly because she discovered that they were secretly maintaining a relationship with their aunt Olivia.[12] Both sisters have refused to comment publicly about their feud and dysfunctional family relationships.
De Havilland today
A resident of Paris since the 1950s, de Havilland rarely makes public appearances. According to John Lichfield in a 14 July 2009 interview published in the Independent, she is working on an autobiography and hoped to have a first draft by September 2009.[13]
She appeared as a presenter at the 75th Annual Academy Awards in 2003, earning a minute-long standing ovation on her entrance. In June 2006, she made appearances at tributes for her 90th birthday at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences and the Los Angeles County Art Museum. In 2004, Turner Classic Movies put together a retrospective piece called Melanie Remembers in which de Havilland was interviewed for the 65th anniversary of Gone with the Wind's original release. The film's last surviving principal cast member, de Havilland remembered every detail of her casting as well as filming. The 40-minute documentary can be seen on the Gone with the Wind four-disc special collector's edition.
On November 17, 2008, at the age of 92, she received the National Medal for the Arts.
She narrated the 2009 documentary, I Remember Better When I Paint.[14]
Filmography
Features
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1935 | Alibi Ike | Dolly Stevens | |
| The Irish in Us | Lucille Jackson | ||
| A Midsummer Night's Dream | Hermia, in Love with Lysander | as Olivia de Haviland (film debut)[5] | |
| Captain Blood | Arabella Bishop | ||
| 1936 | Anthony Adverse | Angela Giuseppe | |
| The Charge of the Light Brigade | Elsa Campbell | as Olivia De Havilland | |
| 1937 | Call It a Day | Catherine 'Cath' Hilton | |
| It's Love I'm After | Marcia West | ||
| The Great Garrick | Germaine de la Corbe | ||
| 1938 | Gold Is Where You Find It | Serena 'Sprat' Ferris | |
| The Adventures of Robin Hood | Lady Marian Fitzwalter | ||
| Four's a Crowd | Lorri Dillingwell | ||
| Hard to Get | Margaret Richards | as Olivia De Havilland | |
| 1939 | Wings of the Navy | Irene Dale | |
| Dodge City | Abbie Irving | ||
| The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex | Lady Penelope Gray | ||
| Gone with the Wind | Melanie Hamilton Wilkes | Nominated — Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress | |
| Raffles | Gwen Manders | ||
| 1940 | My Love Came Back | Amelia Cornell | |
| Santa Fe Trail | Kit Carson Holliday | ||
| 1941 | The Strawberry Blonde | Amy Lind Grimes | |
| Hold Back the Dawn | Emmy Brown | Nominated — Academy Award for Best Actress | |
| They Died with Their Boots On | Elizabeth Bacon Custer | ||
| 1942 | The Male Animal | Ellen Turner | |
| In This Our Life | Roy Timberlake | ||
| 1943 | Thank Your Lucky Stars | Herself | |
| Princess O'Rourke | Princess Maria – aka Mary Williams | as Olivia DeHavilland | |
| 1944 | Government Girl | Elizabeth 'Smokey' Allard | |
| 1946 | To Each His Own | Miss Josephine 'Jody' Norris | Academy Award for Best Actress |
| Devotion | Charlotte Bronte | ||
| The Well-Groomed Bride | Margie Dawson | ||
| The Dark Mirror | Terry/Ruth Collins | ||
| 1948 | The Snake Pit | Virginia Stuart Cunningham | Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Award for Best Actress in a Foreign Film National Board of Review Award for Best Actress New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Volpi Cup Nominated — Academy Award for Best Actress |
| 1949 | The Heiress | Catherine Sloper | Academy Award for Best Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress |
| 1952 | My Cousin Rachel | Rachel Sangalletti Ashley | Nominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama |
| 1955 | That Lady | Ana de Mendoza | |
| Not as a Stranger | Kristina Hedvigson | ||
| 1956 | The Ambassador's Daughter | Joan Fisk | |
| 1958 | The Proud Rebel | Linnett Moore | |
| 1959 | Libel | Lady Margaret Loddon | |
| 1962 | Light in the Piazza | Meg Johnson | |
| 1964 | Lady in a Cage | Mrs. Cornelia Hilyard | |
| Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte | Miriam Deering | as Olivia deHavilland | |
| 1970 | The Adventurers | Deborah Hadley | as Olivia De Havilland |
| 1972 | Pope Joan | Mother Superior | |
| 1977 | Airport '77 | Emily Livingston | |
| 1978 | The Swarm | Maureen Schuster | as Olivia De Havilland |
| 1979 | The Fifth Musketeer | Queen (Mary) Mother | |
| 2009 | I Remember Better When I Paint | Narrator |
Short subjects
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1935 | A Dream Comes True | Herself (uncredited) | About the making of A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| 1936 | The Making of a Great Motion Picture | Herself (uncredited) | About the making of Anthony Adverse |
| 1937 | A Day at Santa Anita | Herself (uncredited) | Stars attended a horse race at the famed racetrack |
| Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 10 | Herself | Stars and their pets attend a swim meet | |
| 1943 | Show Business at War | Herself | newsreel about progress of the Hollywood war effort |
Television work
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1966 | Noon Wine | Ellie Thompson | ABC Stage 67 |
| 1972 | The Screaming Woman | Laura Wynant | |
| 1979 | Roots: The Next Generations | Mrs. Warner | miniseries |
| 1982 | Murder Is Easy | Honoria Waynflete | as Olivia De Havilland |
| The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana | Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother | ||
| 1986 | North and South II | Mrs. Neal | miniseries |
| Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna | Dowager Empress Maria | Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film Nominated — Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie |
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| 1988 | The Woman He Loved | Aunt Bessie |
Notes
- ↑ thePeerage.com – Person Page 18366
- ↑ Olivia de Havilland biography at Film Reference.com
- ↑ "Hollywood's Oldest Feud"
- ↑ Olivia de Havilland Biography – OliviadeHavilland.net
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Brown, Gene (1995). Movie Time: A Chronology of Hollywood and the Movie Industry from its Beginnings to the Present. New York: MacMillan. p. 125. ISBN 0-02-86042906.
- ↑ Shipman, p. 153
- ↑ "De Havilland lawsuit makes 7 year limit law"
- ↑ Shipman, p.151
- ↑ "Olivia de Havilland Recalls Her Role – in the Cold War", The Wall Street Journal (7 September 2006). Retrieved 17 October 2009.
- ↑ Interview on TCM
- ↑ Eyre, Hermione (19 March 2010). "Hollywood's sweetheart: Olivia de Havilland". London Evening Standard. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23816660-hollywoods-sweetheart-olivia-de-havilland.do.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Higham, Charles. Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Haviland and Joan Fontaine. Coward McCann, May 1984, 257 pages.
- ↑ "Golden girl: The divine Olivia de Havilland" The Independent (14 July 2009). Retrieved 17 October 2009.
- ↑ "New York Daily News". http://events.nydailynews.com/new-york-ny/events/show/89075399-documentary-screening-i-remember-better-when-i-paint.
Further reading
- de Havilland, Olivia. Every Frenchman Has One. Random House, 1962, 202 pages. Comic observations on life in Paris; little actual biographical information.
- Fontaine, Joan. No Bed of Roses. Morrow, 1978, 319 pages. Fontaine's autobiography, containing much detail about growing up with her sister.
- Higham, Charles. Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Haviland and Joan Fontaine. Coward McCann, May 1984, 257 pages.
- Lamparski, Richard. Manhattan Diary. BearManor Media, 2006 ISBN 1-59393-054-2
- Shipman, David, The Great Movie Stars, The Golden Years, Bonanza Books, New York, 1970. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 78-133803
- Thomas, Tony. The Films of Olivia de Havilland. Citadel Press, 1983, 255 pages. Foreword by Bette Davis.
External links
- Olivia de Havilland
- Olivia de Havilland at the Internet Movie Database
- Olivia de Havilland at the TCM Movie Database
- Olivia de Havilland at the Internet Broadway Database
- Screen Actors Guild
- Photographs and bibliography
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