Olivia de Havilland
Olivia Mary de Havilland (born 1 July 1916) is a two-time Academy Award-winning actress. She is the elder sister of actress Joan Fontaine, also an Academy Award winner. Along with Shirley Temple, Maureen O'Hara, Luise Rainer, Gloria Stuart, Deanna Durbin and her sister, Joan Fontaine, de Havilland is one of the last surviving female stars from Hollywood of the 1930s. She is also the last living lead from the Hollywood classic Gone with the Wind.
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 Bros. contract players, she was hired to reprise her role as Hermia. After this, de Havilland 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. De Havilland 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 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 courage in mounting such a challenge, and her subsequent victory, won her the respect and admiration of her peers, among them her sister Joan Fontaine who later commented, "Hollywood owes Olivia a great deal". 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".
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... and an undivided pleasure to see." 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 was reported to have declined the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, citing the unsavory 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 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.
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