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Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1, 1916) is a two time Academy Award winning Japanese-born British actress who became an American citizen in 1941.
Early life
Her father was the half-brother of 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 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
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 and 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. Though De Havilland continued acting on film until the late 1970s, she continued her career on television until the late 80s, which included her winning a Golden Globe for her performance in the 1986 miniseries Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna. Sibling RivalryBiographer Charles Higham records that the sisters have always had an uneasy relationship, starting in early childhood, when Olivia would rip up the clothes that Joan had to wear as hand-me-downs, forcing Joan to sew them back together. Olivia de Havilland was the first to become an actress; when her sister, Joan Fontaine, tried to follow her lead, their mother, who allegedly favoured Olivia, refused to let her use the family name. So Joan was forced to invent a name (Joan Burfield, and later Joan Fontaine, utilizing her own mother's former stage name). 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). Charles Higham has described the events of the awards ceremony, stating that as Fontaine stepped forward to collect her award, she 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 de Havilland had allegedly taken offense at a comment Fontaine made about de Havilland's then-husband. 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. Fontaine is reported to be estranged from her own daughters as well, possibly because she discovered that they were secretly maintaining a relationship with their aunt Olivia. Both sisters have refused to comment publicly about their feud. Personal lifeThough Olivia and Errol Flynn were known as one of Hollywood's most exciting on-screen couples, appearing in eight films together, they never had a romantic life off screen. In an interview with Gregory Speck, Olivia stated, "He never guessed that I had a crush on him. And it didn't get better either. In fact, I read in something that he wrote that he was in love with me when we made 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' the next year, in 1936. I was amazed to read that, for it never occurrred to me that he was smitten with me, too, even though we did all those pictures together." De Havilland had relationships with John Huston, Jimmy Stewart and Howard Hughes in the early 1940s. She married novelist Marcus Goodrich in 1946 but they divorced in 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 Bette Davis and Gloria Stuart. Olivia todayA 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. With the death of Katharine Hepburn in 2003, many consider de Havilland to be the last remaining great leading lady of 1930s and 40s Hollywood. Academy AwardsWins:
Nominations:
Selected Filmography
Television work
References
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