Olivia de Havilland of "Gone with the Wind" Dies at 104

PARIS, KOMPAS.com – “Gone with the Wind” actress Olivia de Havilland passed away in Paris, France on Sunday at the age of 104.

“Gone with the Wind” was one in a dozen films that the actress starred in and she was also one of the last links with Hollywood’s golden era.

Olivia was the sister of Joan Fontaine, another Hollywood starlet. She was also a double Oscar winner who embodied the glamour of the 1930s and 1940s silver screen.

In her formidable career, Olivia de Havilland starred alongside Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh.

"If you can be dignified in an all-star epic about insect apocalypse — which she was — you can be dignified anywhere and everywhere," wrote film critic Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times in 2016.

His statement was referring to her part in "The Swarm" (1978).

"That was de Havilland's ace as a star. Dignity everywhere." wrote Nigel.

During a 2003 Oscars ceremony, Olivia was met with a standing ovation that lasted nearly four minutes where the actress presented an award at the event.

The round of applause came from members of modern Hollywood who paid homage to one of the long-lasting emblems of its past glory.

Wide acclaim 

"Gone with the Wind" (1939) brought de Havilland wide acclaim for her role as the long-suffering Melanie, love rival to the fiery Scarlett O'Hara played by Leigh.

The film was the highest-grossing movie of all time, adjusted for inflation, but its depiction of contented slaves and heroic slaveholders has garnered criticism in recent years.

Following this year's mass protests against racism and police brutality, it was removed from the HBO Max streaming platform in June.

The movie is pending a return at a later date along with a discussion of its historical context. The film, however, led to Olivia's first Oscar nomination.

But on the back of this roaring success, she frustrated her bosses at Warner Brothers, who at the time effectively owned their stars, by rejecting script after script when she found the roles uninspiring.

And in a shocking move for the era, she sued the studios, demanding release from a seven-year contract.

In 1945 she won the case — a far-reaching ruling that gave actors the right to choose their own roles and career paths that is still known as the de Havilland law.

"You were a great celebrity but also a slave," she said of the previous system in a 2009 interview with The Irish Independent.

Having been blacklisted for three years and unable to work, her career was revived by the legal victory, bringing her the freedom to pick her roles.

In 1946 she won her first Oscar for "To Each His Own" with her portrayal of an unmarried mother's heartbreaking struggle over a child she could not acknowledge.

She won her second Oscar for her role as a socially inept spinster in "The Heiress" three years later.

Famous sister, infamous feud

Olivia de Havilland was also involved in her own real-life Hollywood drama: a long-running estrangement from her sister Joan.

Joan was one year her junior and the lead in classic films by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Max Ophuls.

Neither actress ever spoke publicly about their feud and their careers shuttled along in frosty parallel.

In 1941 de Havilland lost out to Fontaine for an Oscar and the sisters, born to British parents living in Tokyo, remain the only siblings in Academy Award history to have both won lead acting honors.

Twice married and with two children, Olivia's second husband was French journalist Pierre Galante and the relationship took her to Paris in the mid-1950s where she remained.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she shuttled back to the US for film and television work, but she progressively retreated from the limelight.

Roles were hardly forthcoming in her adoptive France.

"I thought that I had made great progress with my French when a grande dame said to me one day: 'You speak French very well Olivia, but you have a slight Yugoslav accent.' I suppose there were not parts in French movies for actresses with Yugoslav accents," she told The Irish Independent.

Still fighting at 101

In 2018, aged 101, Olivia took on the industry in another major court battle, suing the FX network over a depiction of her in its Emmy-nominated miniseries "Feud: Bette and Joan".

The miniseries was about the enmity between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

Olivia de Havilland argued the series put her in a bad light, with her fictional version describing her sister as a "bitch".

An appeals court unanimously tossed out the lawsuit, prioritizing the rights of the show's creators to freedom of speech over her complaint.

Interviewed by the New York Times weeks before the ruling, Olivia de Havilland cautioned that if there were no consequences for fictional portrayals of real personalities, then "lies about well-known public figures masquerading as the truth will become more and more common". 

(Writer & Editor: Agence France-Presse) 

Source: http://u.afp.com/37vL