by Nathaniel R
We have long dreaded this day coming so it's with heavy hearts that we share that the iconic Olivia de Havilland has passed away. We have celebrated her several times here at The Film Experience, most notably in 2016 with a multi-film retrospective for her Centennial. Having been a true screen immortal for the past (gulp) 80 years, it was hard to picture this woman as an actual mortal. Pictures of her happily bicycling in Paris in her centenarian years were popular around the web but all things eventually end. The Oscar winner, who had just celebrated her 104th birthday on July 1st, died peacefully yesterday in her Parisian home...
De Havilland's entire life had long since become the stuff of legend. A true international woman, she was born in Japan to British parents, became world famous by way of Hollywood, and later adopted France as her home country. Olivia's Hollywood breakthrough came in her very first year at the movies. In 1935 she appeared in the Best Picture nominated A Midsummer Nights' Dream and opposite Errol Flynn in the hit swashbuckler Captain Blood (1935). Erroll and Olivia became one of the public's favourite movie duos, appearing in seven more films together. Their peak together was inarguably 1938's still beloved Best Picture nominee The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
Her stardom was instant and cultural immortality followed quickly thereafter, by way of her pitch perfect performance as kind hearted "Melanie Hamilton" in Gone With the Wind (1939). Many famous films and much Oscar love followed. By the time she was 33 she'd won two Best Actress Oscars for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949) from five nominations (the others were for Gone With the Wind, Hold Back the Dawn, and one that meant a lot to her personally, The Snake Pit). Other key movies in her filmography include Anthony Adverse (1936), It's Love I'm After (1937), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), In This Our Life (1942), The Dark Mirror (1946), My Cousin Rachel (1952), and Light in the Piazza (1962). In the mid 60s she joined the Hagsploitation craze in Hollywood with a sharp against-type supporting turn in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964) and headlined the underappreciated but super-watchable thriller Lady in a Cage (1964).
After that brief resurgence her career quieted, with a smattering of small movie roles and TV guest spots, most famously the all star disaster movie Airport 77 (1977), and two miniseries North and South, Book II (1986) and her Emmy nominated and Golden Globe winning work in Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986). She retired in the late 80s to Paris, France where she's lived ever since.
Though her screen persona was somewhat genteel and her most celebrated role (The Heiress) empathetically passive, actual history paints an entirely different portrait of this screen goddess. Her long intimate friendship with the indominatable Bette Davis, her infamous rivalry with her younger sister Joan Fontaine (who won an Oscar first), and her landmark industry-changing lawsuit (which freed actors from the then opressive long-term studio contracts), and her 2017 lawsuit against the miniseries Feud, all suggest that her vulnerable and soft screen presence was, at least in part, a beautiful illusion. She was as steely, in her own way, as contemporaries like Davis, Stanwyck, and Crawford, who all visibly projected fierceness as brand and, in some cases, as warning.
Olivia de Havilland may have been an instant legend but she earned that immortality over and over again. And so we must say goodbye to the last remaining Golden Age superstar. Hollywood's most mythic period is now only a cultural memory, with none of the key participants left to offer a living one. But what myths they all made together.