Actress Olivia de Havilland turns 100!

Olivia de Havilland turns 100: An appreciation

By G. Allen Johnson
June 29, 2016

One would like to think that Olivia de Havilland, the last remaining cast member from “Gone With the Wind” and, indeed, the last remaining female star from Hollywood’s Golden Age, had a vibrant lunch among friends at her Paris residence to celebrate her 100th birthday on Friday, July 1.

“She’s gone through life collecting friends,” film critic and author Donald Spoto, a good friend who often lunches with de Havilland, said during a visit to San Francisco in 2013. “She’ll talk about her films if you ask her, but she never turns the spotlight on herself. She’s much more interested in hearing about you, and what you’re doing. She’s an extraordinary human being.”

Although she has lived in Paris since 1953, leaving Hollywood for marriage, the spotlight is on her once again. It’s high time to reassess one of the most underrated major careers in Hollywood history, a career that began in the Bay Area in the 1930s, in the theater department at Los Gatos High, and yielded five Academy Awards nominations and two wins for best actress — she is one of only 13 women to have won multiple Oscars for acting.

Olivia Mary de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916, in Tokyo to British parents. She and her younger sister Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland (who became Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine) moved to Saratoga as toddlers when their mother, a former stage actress, sought to escape a crumbling marriage to a patent attorney and former English professor.

De Havilland, 15 months older than Fontaine, hit it big first when she was discovered by a friend of Austrian theater and film director Max Reinhardt, who was casting for a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Hollywood Bowl. Jack Warner signed her to a contract at 18, and so much for higher education — she gave up her spot at Mills College to pursue a Hollywood career.

Decades later, de Havilland’s career is remembered for two things — her films with Errol Flynn, with whom she co-starred nine times, and her role as Melanie Wilkes in “Gone With the Wind.” In both functions, she is seen as the rock-solid influence that reins in combustible, sexier, irrepressible personalities — whether it’s Flynn’s Captain Blood, Robin Hood or, bizarrely, Custer (in Raoul Walsh’s delirious “They Died With Their Boots On”); or, in the case of “Gone With the Wind,” that force of nature known as Scarlett O’Hara.

De Havilland’s Melanie Wilkes is the anti-Scarlett — plain, respectable, steady as she goes. Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) goes to her for advice, not lovemaking. Even her husband, Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), can barely avert his eyes from Scarlett (Vivien Leigh), the dynamo who drives the story.

While Flynn (“Welcome to Sherwood, my lady!”) and Leigh (“Tomorrow is another day”) got the memorable lines, de Havilland was quietly developing a commanding onscreen presence built on saucer-like eyes that could rival Bette Davis’, a deep, authoritative voice that could rival Joan Crawford’s, and an acting style built on economy of movement.

The success of “Gone With the Wind” and her Oscar nomination for supporting actress (she lost to co-star Hattie McDaniel, the first person of color to win an Academy Award) allowed her gradually to wean herself away from the Flynn films and the yoke of Warner’s contract and to develop a career as a leading lady.

De Havilland, although a very attractive woman who was a licensed pilot and dated the likes of Howard Hughes, James Stewart, John Huston and, possibly, Flynn (she says they had a thing but never consummated it), was never a sex symbol. No one had pinups of de Havilland the way they did Veronica Lake, Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth. Even Fontaine, who became a star herself thanks to a pair of Alfred Hitchcock films (“Rebecca,” “Suspicion”), was considered more beautiful and stylish.

But de Havilland was emerging as an independent woman. After successful performances in“The Male Animal” and Huston’s “In This Our Life” — where she had to counterbalance yet another Scarlett-like personality, played by Davis — she was loaned out to Paramount for Mitchell Leisen’s “Hold Back the Dawn” and found her forte: the spinsterish woman who learns that true love is for fairy tales. In this world, she must rely on grit, determination — and herself.

“Hold Back the Dawn” stars Charles Boyer as a Romanian gigolo who marries schoolteacher de Havilland to get a green card. Complications ensue. De Havilland had her first great starring role, and she was rewarded with an Academy Award nomination, this time as best actress. She lost to Fontaine (“Suspicion”), one of the many strange twists and turns in a lifelong love-hate relationship between the sisters. (Fontaine eventually retired to Carmel. She died in 2013 at 97.)

Soon it dawned on de Havilland that her best work came when she was loaned out to other studios. When Jack Warner tried to invoke a clause that would extend her contract at Warner Bros., she sued — and won. It was a groundbreaking lawsuit that shook up Hollywood, and soon, long contracts became a thing of the past, one of the factors that led to the collapse of the studio system.

Freed from Warner, de Havilland embarked on the best five-year period of her career, during which she would win two Oscars (reteaming with Leisen in “To Each His Own,” and for William Wyler’s “The Heiress,” an adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square” that is perhaps her best performance). She was also nominated for the groundbreaking look at mental health “The Snake Pit.”

There is one film, though, that proved how alluring de Havilland could be. In Robert Siodmak’s “The Dark Mirror,” de Havilland plays twin sisters — one good, the other evil. One of them might be guilty of murder. Could de Havilland have been channeling her relationship with Fontaine while playing that role?

It’s a guilty pleasure that showcases all the Olivias — from Flynn’s object of desire to Melanie Wilkes to Catherine Sloper, her great role in “The Heiress” — in one tightly wound noir package.

Happy birthday, Olivia. Let’s raise a glass.

G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen


http://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/Olivia-de-Havilland-turns-100-An-appreciation-8332842.phpvilland turens 100!