Olivia de Havilland
turns 95 today. She may be the last surviving cast member of Gone With the Wind but there’s more to
her than just playing Melanie Wilkes. She won the Academy Award twice, had a
notorious long running public feud with her sister, Joan Fontaine, and starred
in some of the great classics of the 1930s and 1940s.
As Arabella Bishop in Captain Blood.
A beauty with a
cultured voice, she could play plain when called upon and do comedy while
always maintaining a certain dignity. She made her film debut in 1935 as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream after
being spotted in a production of the play at the Hollywood Bowl. That same year
she played the flirty Arabella Bishop in Captain
Blood, the first of eight films that would see her paired with Errol Flynn.
Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
As Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.
In the 1940s,
frustrated with the parts given her by Warner Bros, she began to reject scripts.
The studio countered with suspending her, which caused her contract to be
extended, a common practice at the time. Olivia decided to stand up to the
studios and with the backing of the Screen Actor’s Guild filed a lawsuit in 1943.
The following year she won and what became known as the de Havilland Law was enacted,
which states that a personal service contract is for seven consecutive calendar
years. This landmark decision changed the stronghold the studios had on its
stars and allowed them more artistic freedom. The law is still helping artists
today.
De Havilland’s
roles started to improve and she was finally rewarded for her acting abilities. She not only took home two Academy Awards for best actress for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949) but won acclaim for
her nominated role as a woman who finds herself in a state insane asylum in The Snake Pit (1948), one of the first
films to shine a light on the conditions in asylums.
Olivia’s talents
extended beyond the big screen to both stage and television, and she even
authored a humorous account of her experience living in France, where she moved in the 1950s, in Every Frenchman Has One, published in
1962.
Today she lives
quietly in Paris, a shining example of a true classic Hollywood star. Happy
Birthday Olivia.
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