Happy 100th Birthday!!! Olivia de Havilland

Friday, July 1, is Olivia de Havilland’s 100th birthday — yep, she’s alive and well and living in Paris. The two-time Academy Award winner has been honored from afar by a theater near her old stomping grounds, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, for the past two months, a tribute that culminates with a weeklong booking of her signature film, “Gone With the Wind” (which played the 1939 best picture winner during its original theatrical run).

De Havilland, who along with her Oscar-winning sister, Joan Fontaine, grew up in Saratoga and attended Los Gatos High School. De Havilland created her signature role, Melanie Wilkes, the rock-steady confidant of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) and husband of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) as they, with occasional help from Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), negotiate the challenges of the post-Civil War South, as imagined by author Margaret Mitchell.

— G. Allen Johnson

“Gone With the Wind”: 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 1; 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, July 2-3. Through Friday, July 8. $7. Stanford Theatre, 221 University Ave., Palo Alto. (650) 324-3700. www.stanfordtheatre.org

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.php

(CNN)She was pretty and demure, and usually played sympathetic heroines with ladylike airs in a movie career that spanned three decades.

But off-screen she was a fighter, maneuvering for challenging roles and winning a tough legal battle against a major studio, a victory that still resonates in Hollywood 70 years later.
This Friday, Olivia de Havilland proves once again she's no ordinary Hollywood survivor. The Oscar-winning actress is celebrating her 100th birthday as the last surviving female superstar from the golden era of movies. Her chief male competitor, Kirk Douglas, will join the centenarian club in December, but de Havilland made her screen debut more than 10 years before him.
She first became famous as a damsel in distress opposite Errol Flynn in swashbuckling epics such as "Captain Blood" (1935) and "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938).
Her most enduring role came in "Gone With the Wind" (1939), still Hollywood's top moneymaking film when adjusted for inflation. Her sweet and gentle Melanie Wilkes seemed too good to be true, but she held her own against the fiery Scarlett O'Hara.

De Havilland won two Academy Awards for best actress -- for "To Each His Own" (1946) and "The Heiress" (1949) -- after breaking free from what she considered the unworthy parts being offered to her at Warner Bros. She successfully sued the studio in 1943 after it tried to extend her seven-year contract. Under the old contract system, studios wielded enormous power over actors, forcing them to take roles and suspending them without pay if they refused.
De Havilland's case helped shift the power from the big studios of that era to the mega-celebrities and powerful talent agencies of today, and it remains a cornerstone of entertainment law.
The Hollywood grande dame has lived in Paris for six decades and outlasted most of her contemporaries, including her younger sister, actress Joan Fontaine, with whom she had a notoriously testy relationship.
In an interview last year for a recent Vanity Fair profile, writer William Stadiem remarked of de Havilland: "Her face is unlined, her eyes sparkling, her fabled contralto soaring ... her memory photographic. She could easily pass for someone decades younger."
To see this classic movie star in action, you can tune in to Turner Classic Movies on Friday nights in July. TCM, a Time Warner company like CNN, has named de Havilland its star of the month.


http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/30/entertainment/cnnphotos-tbt-olivia-de-havilland-100th-birthday/index.html

PARIS (AFP) - Screen legend Olivia de Havilland, who turns 100 on Friday, is the last surviving star from “Gone with the Wind” and one of the last great stars of Hollywood’s bygone golden era.
The two-time Oscar winner and five-time Academy Award nominee came to embody the elegant glamour of the silver screen in the 1930s and 1940s.

But she also made waves with a landmark legal battle against the Hollywood studios and a secret feud with her equally famous sister, Joan Fontaine.

The 1939 box-office blockbuster “Gone with the Wind” brought de Havilland wide acclaim for her role as the noble, long-suffering Melanie, starring opposite Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in the US Civil War epic.

Her performance as love rival to the fiery Scarlett O’Hara, played by Leigh, led to de Havilland’s first Oscar nod for best supporting actress.

But she lost out to co-star Hattie McDaniel, who played the character of Mammy and became the first African-American to win an Academy Award.

The film sealed De Havilland’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies, but with her doe-eyed looks she soon felt frustrated at the roles she was offered, fearful of being typecast as a sweet, innocent young thing.

“Playing a good girl was difficult in the 30s, when the fad was to play bad girls,” she once said in an interview.

“Actually, I think playing bad girls is a bore. I have always had more luck with good girl roles because they require more from an actress.”

Her screen debut had come as Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1935 after director Max Reinhardt spotted her in a local theatre production of the play.

She won accolades for her role opposite swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood” later the same year, and their on-screen chemistry persuaded studio bosses to cast her alongside Flynn in seven other movies.

Correcting‘a serious abuse

De Havilland incurred the wrath of the bosses at Warner Bros., who at that time effectively owned their stars, by rejecting script after script.

In what was a shocking move for the era, she sued the studios to be released from her seven-year contract and won, in a far-reaching 1945 ruling which gave actors the right to choose their own roles and career paths.

It is still known as the De Havilland law, and the actress once said of it:

“I was very proud of that decision, for it corrected a serious abuse of the contract system... No one thought I would win, but I did.”

During her court case, she was blacklisted for three years and unable to work, but her legal victory kickstarted her career.

The following year in 1946 she won her first Oscar for her portrayal of Jody Norris in “To Each His Own”, in an edgier role as an unmarried mother and her heartbreaking struggle to stay near to the child she could never acknowledge.

She won her second Academy Award for playing the socially inept spinster Catherine Sloper in “The Heiress” in 1949.

In a real-life Hollywood drama, De Havilland was estranged for many years from her sister Joan Fontaine, her junior by a year and a screen legend in her own right.

Neither actress has ever spoken publicly about their feud, but in 1941 De Havilland lost out on an Oscar for her lead performance as Emmy Brown in “Hold Back the Dawn” to Fontaine, who picked up the statuette for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion”.

The sisters remain the only siblings in Oscar history to have both won lead acting honours.

Soul-crushing

The two girls were born to British parents living in Tokyo. In a twist of fate, De Havilland fell ill as a girl leading to an initially short stay in California that stretched into years.

De Havilland became a naturalised US citizen in 1941, but in the 1950s her career began to wilt as she despaired at the growing promiscuousness in the movie world.

She appeared in a few films in the 1970s and also did some television work in the 1980s. But she is said to have once pronounced: “The TV business is soul-crushing, talent-destroying and human-being-destroying.”

Romantically, De Havilland was linked to John Huston, James Stewart and Howard Hughes in the 1940s, but she married novelist Marcus Goodrich in 1946, by whom she had a son, Benjamin.

The couple divorced in 1953, and De Havilland later married French journalist Pierre Galante, with whom she had a daughter, Giselle, in 1956.

They later divorced but when Galante fell ill, she nursed him during his final days in Paris and remained in the French capital.


http://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2016/06/30/golden-age-hollywood-starlet-olivia-de-havilland-turns-100/

Screen legend Olivia de Havilland celebrates her 100th birthday on July 1



Friday marks quite the milestone for Olivia de Havilland. The famed "Gone with the Wind" star -- and the last living member of its sprawling cast -- will turn 100 years old.


De Havilland was born July 1, 1916 in Tokyo to British parents. The family moved to California three years later, and she made her screen debut in 1935 in Max Reinhardt's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Four years later, she would appear as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes alongside Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel in "Gone with the Wind." Her other notable screen roles included "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Hold Back the Dawn," "The Heiress," "The Snake Pit" and "To Each his Own."

De Havilland and sister Joan Fontaine are the only pair of siblings to have won Academy Awards in a lead acting category. A fierce rivalry between de Havilland and Fontaine led to a decades-long estrangement.

De Havilland retired from acting in 1988.


Olivia de Havilland arrives at the 36th Cesar Film Awards at Theatre du Chatelet on February 25, 2011 in Paris. FRANCOIS DURAND/GETTY IMAGES
During her career, de Havilland won two Oscars, two Golden Globes, an Emmy and numerous awards from film critics associations and film festivals. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the National Medal of Arts, and she was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in France.



A resident of Paris, de Havilland's birthday was celebrated stateside on Thursday at the Santa Monica Airport's Spitfire Grill, according to the Santa Monica Observer. Though the actress herself was not in attendance, guests dressed as characters from her films and taped a special message for her.

Santa Monica Mayor Tony Vasquez also declared Friday to be Olivia de Havilland Day in the beachside city.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/olivia-de-havilland-100th-birthday-july-1/

Tim Robey, Film Critic

1 July 2016 • 12:10pm

"Olivia has always said I was first at everything,” said Joan Fontaine of her sister, Olivia de Havilland, to People magazine in 1978. “I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she'll be furious, because again I'll have got there first!"

Olivia de Havilland didn’t sound furious when Joan Fontaine died, back in December 2013, and issued an entirely normal-sounding statement of sisterly grief. But the fact that Joan died aged 96 has meant that only one of the sisters has reached the ripe old age of 100, and that’s Olivia, today.

She may have been pipped at the post to everything else, but this feat – along with eventually winning two Oscars to Joan’s mere one – is hers alone.


Give or take Kirk Douglas, de Havilland is one of the last true greats of the Hollywood Golden Age still drawing breath. She has legendary credits to her name, including the signature role of Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939) for which Joan auditioned before she got the part.

But it’s her relationship with her sister that gets us all to lean in close, wondering if the record will ever be set straight. Depending on who you believe, this is either one of the most storied and bitter rivalries in film history, or a fiction cooked up by the gossip-hungry press.

One version sees a Cold War enacted across decades, with rumours of little to no communication through much of the sisters’ adult life. The other – supported by Fontaine shortly before her death – sweeps this aside as bunk, and says they spoke and visited all the time.
"I bequeath to my sister the ability to win boys’ hearts, which she does not have at present"Olivia De Havilland

It seems unlikely that de Havilland, comfortably ensconced in her Paris home and the subject of a much-deserved BFI retrospective this month, will be weighing in on the matter any time soon. According to her sister’s autobiography No Bed of Roses (1978), it began as classic sibling rivalry from their earliest childhood years. Olivia, the older sister by 15 months, rattled the crib and ripped her hand-me-downs.


One fight broke Joan’s collar-bone, and Olivia was a wicked bully in print, publishing a fake will in their high school newspaper with this devilish line: “I bequeath to my sister the ability to win boys’ hearts, which she does not have at present.”

They competed for the attentions of their actress mother, Lillian, especially after she moved them from Tokyo to Los Angeles post-divorce and they started jostling for parts in films. While Olivia got the earliest breaks, in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and a series of swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, Joan served as her chaffeur, despite harbouring her own ambitions as a star.


Deterred by their mother from seeking employment at Warner Bros, where Olivia was thriving, Joan got small parts at RKO, and then caught the attention of George Cukor in The Women (1939), right at the moment when Cukor and Selznick were engaged in their legendary Gone with the Wind casting blitz.

Fontaine – who chose her stepfather’s surname to set herself apart from Olivia – takes the credit for her sister’s casting as Melanie, simply because, according to her account, Joan turned up at the audition wearing overly chic clothes. “You’re much too stylish for the role,” Cukor is meant to have told her, to which she replied in a classic moment of shade, “Well, what about my sister?”

Imagine Fontaine’s envy if de Havilland had waltzed off with the Oscar for that part – Best Supporting Actress – which she was widely tipped to win. Instead, she lost on the night to the first ever black trophy-winner, Hattie McDaniel, in the same film.

The next year, it was Fontaine’s turn, up for Best Actress in another Selznick production, Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Even though the film won Best Picture, she lost to Ginger Rogers. And the year after that, 1941, both sisters were nominated – Joan for Suspicion, Olivia for the immigration romance Hold Back the Dawn.

Relations were understandably tense at the ceremony that night, and then Fontaine’s name was called out. “I stared across the table, where Olivia was sitting directly opposite me,” she wrote in her book. “‘Get up there, get up there,' Olivia whispered commandingly. “Now what had I done? All the animus we'd felt toward each other as children, the hair-pullings, the savage wrestling watches, the time Olivia fractured my collarbone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery. My paralysis was total.”


It feels almost de trop for this great feud to have flared up in public at Academy Awards ceremonies – the stuff of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?-style melodrama, rather than life. And yet it’s the way history records it.

Fast-forward exactly five years, to the Oscars in 1946, and there’s a famous photo of the two sisters, captured by Hymie Fink of Photoplay, just after Olivia levelled the score by winning Best Actress for To Each His Own. Fontaine is meant to have approached her backstage with congratulations, and De Havilland is seen giving her the cold shoulder.

“Our relations have been quite strained for some time,” Olivia told a reporter afterwards. “I couldn’t change my attitude.” And her publicity agent, Henry Rogers, told the press that the two hadn’t spoken for four months. “Miss de Havilland had no wish to have her picture taken with her sister. This goes back for years and years, ever since they were kids,” he said.


There had been man trouble between them in the early Hollywood years, stoking the flames further. If it weren’t enough that Fontaine got married first – the first of four times – she did so to the English actor Brian Aherne, whom Olivia had once dated.

And on the night before their wedding, Olivia’s boyfriend Howard Hughes is meant to have discouraged Joan from going ahead with it: Hughes, the story goes, wanted Joan for himself. When this got back to Olivia, it did so directly from Joan’s mouth. Whatever her intentions, Olivia unforgivingly shot the messenger.


Over the years, though Olivia kept demanding apologies for Joan’s behaviour, things weren’t always openly frosty between them – there’s a photo of them laughing together at a party thrown by Marlene Dietrich in 1967. But another whopping grievance arose when their mother died, in 1975.
"Our relations have been quite strained for some time,” Olivia told a reporter. “I couldn’t change my attitude"

Joan was out of the country and not informed about the funeral arrangements. She threatened to call the press if she wasn’t allowed to attend. At the service, they didn’t speak, beginning a pattern of public avoidance which would endure in 1979, when they took opposite ends of the Academy stage for a 50th anniversary class photo, and at the equivalent event 10 years later, when Joan, in the last Oscars appearance she would ever make, is meant to have switched hotel rooms so that she wouldn’t have to stay next to her sister.

Joan, in her later years, had a habit of denying the vendetta, even though much of the evidence for it is in her own written account. Olivia, for her part, has always adopted queenly silence on the matter, showing no interest in raking over old coals. Why should she? Her years of resenting Fontaine as flavour of the month, or the supposedly prettier one leapfrogging over her own stellar achievements, must be long gone.

She’s the more highly regarded actress by a long shot, and has that pair of trophies to show for it, however long she waited to get them. What’s more – Destiny’s Child crescendo, please – she’s the survivor.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/01/100-years-of-shade-olivia-de-havilland-joan-fontaine-