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A Streetcar Named Desire, allowing her
friend Vivien Leigh, to whom she had
played second fiddle in Gone with the
Wind, to secure her second Academy
Award. It was a rare misjudgment and,
once again, her recovery was swift — 12
months later she was nominated for a
Golden Globe for her performance as
the eponymous heroine in My Cousin
Rachel, opposite a youthful Richard
Burton.
Although she was a naturalised US
citizen and was a strong supporter of
Franklin D Roosevelt, for whose re-
election as president she campaigned
in 1944, De Havilland chose to live in
Paris for the last 50 years of her life, be-
coming very much a francophile while
continuing to act in films, both British
and American, which interested her, in-
cluding Libel (1959) with Dirk Bogarde
and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(1964), a blood-curdling murderentirely failed to do so.” Im-
mediately before The Heiress,
which was directed by Willi-
am Wyler, De Havilland took
a considerable risk by playing
an incarcerated schizophrenic
in the Anatole Litvak thriller
The Snake Pit. The film drew
criticism as well as praise, but
De Havilland always felt that
she had given one of her finest
performances. “Remember,”
she later told an interviewer,
“we made this at a time when
there was still a medieval atti-
tude towards mental illness.
People just didn’t talk about
such things. They were consid-
ered shameful. The case in our
film was that of a seriously de-
ranged young woman at a time
when there weren’t any
modern chemicals, just electric
shock and hydrotherapy.”
Though missing out with The
Snake Pit at that year’s Oscars,
she went on to win the Inter-
national Prize at the 1949 Venice
Film Festival.
In their private lives, which
were extremely public, female
movie stars in the 1930s and
1940s were expected to behave simulta-
neously like virgins and vamps. De
Havilland resolved not to fall into the
many traps of Hollywood, and her rela-
tionships with men were discrimina-
ting — she dated the film star Jimmy
Stewart, the director John Huston and
(briefly) the eccentric tycoon Howard
Hughes. Despite rumours to the con-
trary, she did not embark on an affair
with Flynn. Years later De Havilland re-
vealed that she had had a “very big
crush” on Flynn, but felt unable to re-
spond to his advances until he ended
his marriage to the actress Lili Damita.
Their relationship, in the interim,
was not without its lighter moments.
On location during the making of The
Charge of the Light Brigade, De Havil-
land, who had just turned 20, was
changing her costume in a tent erected
for the purpose when she discovered a
snake in her underwear. Running
screaming from the tent, only half-
dressed, she was not amused to hear
Flynn sniggering behind a bush.
Not long afterwards she and Flynn
were brought together by their fellow
actor David Niven, who invited them to
dinner along with Niven’s latest girl-
friend. The evening was a success and
led to a turn on the dancefloor, much to
the excitement of the local paparazzi. A
photograph of the pair holding hands
was what led De Havilland to back
away from what, in the Hollywood of
the day, would have been viewed as a
juicy scandal.
De Havilland was not a prude — far
from it — but from the start she was de-
termined not to be typecast as a vamp
or a femme fatale. “Playing good girls in
the Thirties was difficult, when the fad
was to play bad girls,” she once said.
“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.”
In 1950 De Havilland turned down
the chance to play the classic bad girl
Blanche DuBois in the movie version ofOlivia de Havilland, left, with her sister,
the actress Joan Fontaine, around 1945,
and below, starring with Errol FlynnHollywood’s “golden age” produced an
unforgettable galaxy of stars. None
burnt brighter or for longer than Dame
Olivia de Havilland, yet she was admi-
rably modest about her success. “One
can’t be on top all the time,” she said.
The two-time Oscar winner will be
remembered by audiences for her per-
formances as Melanie in Gone with the
Wind (1939); as Jody, a pregnant teen-
ager, in To Each His Own (1946); as Vir-
ginia, a terrified schizophrenic, in The
Snake Pit (1948); and as Catherine,
forced to choose between love and
money, in The Heiress (1949). Just as
likely to stick in the mind, for the obvi-
ous spark between her and her co-star
Errol Flynn, were her roles in such
over-the-top extravaganzas as Captain
Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade
and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Off camera, De Havilland’s greatest
role — the one she was born to play —
was that of Hollywood leading lady, for
which she wrote all her own lines, deliv-
ered to perfection over almost eight
decades. Highly intelligent, with a so-
phistication that was never an act, she
was at all times her own woman, acute-
ly aware of the nature of the movie busi-
ness and of the restrictions as well as
the challenges that it presented.
One of the most enduring challenges
that she faced in her personal life was
her relationship with her younger sister,
Joan Fontaine, almost equally as fa-
mous an actress. The sisters were es-
tranged for many years. They were
unique in Hollywood — they were lead-
ing ladies and Oscar winners, and were
determined to give no quarter, either to
each other or to the men in their lives.
Born in Japan during the First World
War, they were raised by their English
parents in Tokyo before moving with
their mother to San Francisco. There
they separately conceived the ambition
to become actresses. Neither had cause
to regret the choice. Having achieved
early success, they went on to become
big stars and pillars of the Hollywood
establishment. It was, however, their
childhood, torn between an uncommit-
ted father with a penchant for geisha
girls and a domineering mother
who took them to America, that
decided their relationship.
Olivia, the elder of the two
by 15 months, resented her
younger sister. The two
fought throughout their
childhood and teenage years.
“I can’t remember a single act of
kindness by Olivia,” Joan told an
interviewer in 1979. Aged nine,
Olivia made a “will” in which she
wrote: “I bequeath all my beauty
to my younger sister Joan,
since she has none.” There
was even a suggestion —
later laughed off by Joan
— that Olivia had once
attacked her and broken
her collarbone.
When Joan won an Os-
car in 1942 for her role in
Suspicion, a grim tale of
class hatred and gold-dig-
ging, Olivia was said to
have been incandescent
with jealousy and rage.
She was the talented
actress, not Joan. After
my — the first African-American to
win an Oscar.
It did not matter; De Havilland’s
career was made. Only 12 months later
she nearly emulated Joan’s achieve-
ment when she was nominated for her
role in Hold Back the Dawn as a young
American woman tricked into marry-
ing a Romanian gigolo. Then, in 1946,
she won the first of her two Academy
Awards, for her performance in the ro-
mantic drama To Each His Own, direct-
ed by Mitchell Leisen, in which, daring-
ly for the time, she played an unmarriedmother forced to give up her child. She
was thrilled, but said: “Even in this won-
derful moment, my common sense re-
minds me quite clearly that most of the
work that went into earn-
ing this award was not
done by Olivia de Havil-
land at all, but by a big
team of other people
who, if justice were really
to prevail, would be
standing up here beside
me now.”
Three years later,
after winning for The
Heiress — a role eerily
reminiscent of Joan’s in
Suspicion — she had
pared her acceptance
speech down to two
sentences: “Your award
for To Each His Own I
took as an incentive to
venture forward. Thank
you for this very generous
assurance that I have notfthat the two didn’t speak for the next
40 years, not even at their mother’s
memorial.
Olivia need not have worried. Her
acting career had got off to a flying start
when she appeared as Hermia in the
1935 Max Reinhardt version of A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream in which, aged
19, she played opposite Mickey Roon-
ey’s Puck. The director had been im-
pressed by her performance in the
same role in a college production and
had signed her up on the spot.
Subsequently Warner Pictures gave
her a seven-year contract, which led to
two forgettable comedies, The Irish in
Us and Alibi Ike, before she was teamed
up with Flynn in Captain Blood, a pi-
rate epic in black and white that estab-
lished its stars as highly bankable
assets.
Up until now, as a prisoner of the
studio system (“we were like a stock
company at Warners; we didn’t know
any of the stars from the other
studios”), De Havilland did more or
less as she was told. It was Gone with
the Wind that changed everything.
An almost catastrophically chaotic
production, the film that would come
to be seen as one of the greatest made
could equally have ended up as a rival
in notoriety to Cleopatra.
The fact that it didn’t was partly down
to the determination shown by the di-
rector Victor Fleming and the producer
David O Selznick, and to the genius of
the screenplay, cobbled together from a
template by Sidney Howard. However,
much of the credit was also due to an
inspired cast, led by Clark Gable as
Rhett Butler, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett
O’Hara and De Havilland as O’Hara’s
beautiful but demure cousin Melanie.
At the Oscars in 1940 the movie
swept all before it, winning ten Aca-
demy Awards. De Havilland was fa-
vourite to win best supporting actress,
but had to give way to Hattie McDaniel,
playing Scarlett’s maidservant, Mam-‘Playing good girls in the
1930s was difficult. The
fad was to play bad girls’
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Two-time Oscar winner who starred in Gone with the Wind and feuded with her sister Joan Fontaine
Obituaries
De Havilland as Melanie Hamilton in