Olivia de Havilland - Rotten Tomatoes Celebrity Profile

Biography

This page uses content from the Olivia de Havilland biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.

Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1, 1916) is a two-time Academy Award-winning film actress.

Early life

De Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan, and is the elder daughter of Walter de Havilland, a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and the former Lilian Augusta Ruse, an actress known by her stage name of Lilian Fontaine, whom he married in 1914.

Her father was the half-brother of the late Charles de Havilland, who was the father of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, the famous aviation pioneer (who died in 1965).

Her younger sister is the actress Joan Fontaine (also born in Tokyo, on October 22, 1917), from whom she has been famously estranged for many decades, not speaking at all since 1975.

De Havilland's family moved from Tokyo when she was two years old, settling in Saratoga, California. She attended school at Los Gatos High School and at the Notre Dame Convent Catholic girls' school in Belmont, California. Subsequently, an acting award at Los Gatos is named after her.

Career

De Havilland's career began co-starring with Joe E. Brown in Alibi Ike in 1935. She 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. Although the stage cast was largely replaced with Warner Brothers contract players, Olivia was hired to reprise her role as Hermia. De Havilland played opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films as Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and as Maid Marian to Flynn's Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

She played Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939) and received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance. Out of the four stars of Gone with the Wind (the others being Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard), she is the only one who is still alive. Ironically, her character was the only one of the four who died in the film.

In 1941, Olivia became a naturalized citizen of the United States. De Havilland and her sister were each nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1942. Fontaine won first for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) over de Havilland's nomination for Hold Back the Dawn (1941).

Biographer Charles Higham has described the events of the awards ceremony, stating that as Fontaine stepped forward to collect her award, she had pointedly rejected de Havilland's attempts at congratulating her and that de Havilland was both offended and embarrassed by her behavior. Several years later, de Havilland would return the favor and brush by Fontaine, who was waiting with her hand extended, because Olivia had allegedly taken offense at a comment Joan made about Olivia's then-husband. He records that the sisters always had an uneasy relationship, even since early childhood, when Olivia would rip up the clothes Joan had to wear as hand-me-downs, forcing Joan to sew them back together. Both sisters have refused to comment.

By this time, de Havilland was becoming increasingly frustrated by the roles being assigned to her. She felt that she had proven herself to be 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. The law 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 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 until that time in Hollywood. Her courage in mounting such a challenge, and her subsequent victory, won her the respect and admiration of her peers. The studio, however, vowed never to hire her again. The court's ruling came to be known, and is still known to this day, as the de Havilland law.

The quality and variety of her roles began to improve. 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 glamour and that confronted such controversial subject matter.

De Havilland appeared sporadically in films after the 1950s and attributed this partly to the growing permissiveness of Hollywood films of the period. She was reported to have declined the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, citing the unsavoury nature of some elements of the script and saying there were certain lines she could not allow herself to speak. The role eventually went to her former Gone with the Wind co-star, Vivien Leigh, who won her second Academy Award for her role. De Havilland continued acting until the 1980s.

Private life

De Havilland had relationships with John Huston, Jimmy Stewart and Errol Flynn in the early 1940s. Afterward, she married and divorced novelist Marcus Goodrich between 1946 and 1953. They had a son, Benjamin, who died of complications from Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1991.

She was married to Pierre Galante from 1955 until 1979, producing a daughter, Giselle, in 1956. When de Havilland and Galante divorced they remained on good terms, and she nursed him through his final illness in Paris, which was the stated reason for her absence from the star-studded 70th Anniversary of the Oscars in 1998.

De Havilland was good friends with her co-star at Warners, the late Bette Davis, and also with Gloria Stuart, the newly rediscovered (in her 80s) ingenue of Titanic.

De Havilland's relationship with Fontaine continued to deteriorate after the incident at the Academy Awards in 1942. Higham has stated that this was the final straw for what would become a lifelong feud, but the sisters did not completely stop speaking until 1975. According to Fontaine, de Havilland did not invite her to a memorial service for their mother who had recently died. De Havilland claims she told Joan, but Joan brushed her off, saying she was too busy to attend.

A resident of Paris since the 1950s, de Havilland lives there in retirement and makes appearances rarely. She is reported to be working on an autobiography. She appeared as a presenter at the 75th Annual Academy Awards in 2003. In June of 2006, de Havilland made appearances at tributes to her 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. Then 88 years old and the only surviving principal cast member, de Havilland remembered every detail of her casting (she was in a contract with Warner Bros, and at first they refused to let her play Melanie for David O. Selznick) as well as filming (Leigh could go immediately from break to filming, and fall into her Scarlett O'Hara part, while Olivia needed 20 minutes to focus to get back into Melanie.) The 40-minute documentary can be seen on the Gone with the Wind four-disc special collector's edition.

Academy Awards

Wins:

1946 - Best Actress in To Each His Own
1949 - Best Actress in The Heiress

Nominations:

1939 - Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind
1941 - Best Actress in Hold Back the Dawn
1948 - Best Actress in The Snake Pit

Selected Filmography

Alibi Ike (1935)
The Irish in Us (1935)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935 film) (1935)
Captain Blood (1935)
A Dream Comes True (1935 - short subject)
Anthony Adverse (1936)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)
The Making of a Great Motion Picture (1936 - short subject)
Call It a Day (1937)
It's Love I'm After (1937)
The Great Garrick (1937)
Gold Is Where You Find It (1938)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Four's a Crowd (1938)
Hard to Get (1938)
A Day at Santa Anita (1939 - short subject)
Wings of the Navy (1939)
Dodge City (1939)
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Raffles (1940)
My Love Came Back (1940)
Santa Fe Trail (1940)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Hold Back the Dawn (1941)
They Died with Their Boots On (1941)
The Male Animal (1942)
In This Our Life (1942)
Show Business at War (1943 - short subject)
Princess O'Rourke (1943)
Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943 film) (1943)
Government Girl (1943)
To Each His Own (1946)
Devotion (1946)
The Well-Groomed Bride (1946)
The Dark Mirror (1946)
The Snake Pit (1948)
The Heiress (1949)
My Cousin Rachel (1952)
That Lady (1955)
Not as a Stranger (1955)
The Ambassador's Daughter (1956)
The Proud Rebel (1958)
Libel (1959)
The Light in the Piazza (1962)
Lady in a Cage (1964)
Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
The Adventurers (1970)
Pope Joan (1972)
Airport '77 (1977)
The Swarm (1978)
The Fifth Musketeer (1979)

Television work

Noon Wine (1966)
The Screaming Woman (1972)
Roots: The Next Generations (1979 - miniseries)
Murder Is Easy (1982)
The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982)
North and South II (1986 - miniseries)
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986)
The Woman He Loved (1988)

External links

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