A Salute to Olivia de Havilland, Oscar’s Last Queen

The last great survivor of Hollywood’s Golden Age, regal and beautiful, de Havilland has every intention of making it to 110 years young

By Mike McCrann

June 23, 2016 :: 8:30 AM

Editor’s Note: Olivia de Havilland will turn 100 on Friday, July 1. TCM is honoring the superstar with its “Star of the Month” tribute. Every Friday night in July. you can see many of her greatest films, including Gone with the Wind and her two Oscar-winning classics: To Each His Own and The Heiress. The Crest Theater in Westwood is also showing The Heiress on the big screen on Friday night, July 1, at 7:30 p.m. We salute this great Hollywood survivor by re-running our tribute story from last year. 

Vanity Fair recently ran a great story and interview with Olivia, in which she was quoted as saying she wants to live to be 110! We say go for it. Frontiers salutes a true living legend!

When Academy Award winner Luise Rainer died in December 2014, two weeks before her 105th birthday, the Oscar mantle was passed to Olivia de Havilland, who won two Best Actress Oscars and starred in the most famous film of all time, Gone with the Wind. De Havilland is 98, alive and well in Paris, France, where she has lived since the mid-’50s. She’s now the oldest living Oscar winner. Kirk Douglas is also 98 and still very much with us, but his Oscar was honorary despite three Best Actor nominations.

Olivia de Havilland and her late sister, Oscar-winner Joan Fontaine, were the subject of my previous article, Sister Act. But now Olivia needs to be fêted as the last great survivor of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Entertainment Weekly recently did a great interview with the legendary star, and Olivia seems bent on reaching the century mark.

De Havilland was a big star before playing Melanie in Gone with the Wind. She came to Warner Brothers in 1935 and was immediately pared with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. Flynn became a star, and the two would co-star in a series of popular films, climaxing with The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. Olivia was Maid Marion, and sexy Errol was a very hot Mr. Hood. In 1939, she played goodie goodie Melanie Wilkes in the mega hit Gone with the Wind, and she made a truly multi-dimensional character out of a rather cardboard heroine. Nominated for Best Supporting Actress, she lost to fellow GWTW actress Hattie McDaniel, who became the first African-American to win an Academy Award.

De Havlland trooped back to the Brothers Warner and was given routine films. She made a loan out to Paramount—Hold Back the Dawn—which netted her a Best Actress nomination. But in 1941 she was up against her sister Joan Fontaine for Suspicion. Joan won, and Olivia never quite got over it. Olivia sued Warner Brothers in 1943 when she thought her seven-year contract was over and Jack Warner added on her suspension time. Olivia was off the screen for two years while the case was stuck in the courts. No other studio dared touch her until the decision. Well, Olivia won and “The De Havilland Decision” meant that a seven-year contract was exactly that.

Free of the Warner prison, Olivia went to Paramount and won the 1946 Best Actress Oscar for the great weepie To Each His Own. Directed by the openly gay Mitchell Leisen, de Havilland played an unwed mother who ages from young girl to embittered middle age. She was dazzling in a film that critic David Thomson called “Her best film. Not only did she appear more beautiful than ever before, but the change to a world centered on the female disclosed a warmth and gentleness that Warners had never bothered about.” De Havilland was at her zenith. That same year she played twins—one good and one a murderess—in the noir thriller The Dark Mirror.

In 1948 she won her third Best Actress nomination, playing a mental patient in the gripping The Snake Pit. (She won the New York Film Critics award with the only unanimous vote in history.) In 1949 she reached her peak, winning a second Best Actress for her brilliant work in William Wyler‘s The Heiress, a performance that Pauline Kael labeled “her finest work.”

Olivia de Havilland was at the apex of her career but made the disastrous mistake of turning down the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire that won Vivien Leigh an Oscar. Olivia did a few stage plays, and when she came back to films for 1952’s My Cousin Rachel, her career was stalled. Olivia married a Frenchman and went to Paris, where she has lived for the past 60 years. She was widowed, and her son from her first marriage died. But she has a lovely daughter, Giselle Galante, who is devoted to her.

Queen de Havilland is now the last great Hollywood star and Oscar winner. According to ET she is “The sole beacon of the Tara torch.” Asked about Gone with the Wind, she stated, “It does not make me melancholy. Instead when I see them (her dead co-stars), I see them vibrantly alive on-screen and I experience a kind of reunion with them—a joyful one.”

Olivia de Havilland has every intention of celebrating her 100th birthday on July 1, 2016. She recently stated, “Oh, I can’t wait for it. I’m certainly relishing the idea of living a century. Can you imagine that? What an achievement.”

We salute Olivia de Havilland. She is the real Oscar gold. Regal and beautiful, we hope she passes the century mark with flying colors. A era in film history will pass with her.