74 The EconomistAugust 8th 2020
O
n the first day of rehearsals for “Captain Blood”, in 1935, Oli-
via de Havilland and Errol Flynn returned their lunch trays to-
gether to the canteen. Already she had thought “Oh!” at the sight of
him; but, being sensible, she had eaten alone at a distant table.
Now they sat together on the stage ramp, by the huge doors that
opened onto the street, and his first words were: “What do you
want out of all this?” She answered, in her clear young English
tones: “I would like respect for difficult work well done.”
That sounded more modest than his aim, which was simply
“success”. But it meant hard fights on several fronts. When she re-
viewed her proudest achievements later, they were not just her
major role in “Gone With the Wind” in 1939 and her two Academy
Awards for Best Actress, in 1947 for “To Each His Own” and in 1950
for “The Heiress”—still less her 49 feature films altogether. She
had also broken the hold of Hollywood studios over their actors,
leaving them freer to choose the roles they were best suited for.
To some extent no one was free at Warner Bros in the Golden
Age. She worked six-day weeks there, dressed, up on her lines and
on the set by 6.30am, shooting until 6pm and until midnight on
Saturdays. She once got a cameraman to blacken her eyes to show
Jack Warner she was tired. That was hardly the worst of it, though.
Because she was small and flawlessly beautiful she was inevitably
an ingénue: the lovely and mindless girl, her pleading eyes hark-
ing back to silent-cinema days, who would lead the hero windingly
but inevitably to the marriage bed. Warner Bros had one great dra-
matic actress, Bette Davis, and two ingénues, one blonde and one
brunette. She was the brunette. And with a burst of menthol in her
eyes, she could weep real tears.
From the start, this rankled with her. She wanted to play wom-
en who were complex and thoughtful, when the best she could
hope for was spirited, wimpled Maid Marian in “The Adventures of
Robin Hood” (1938). In “Gone With the Wind” (made for mgm, notWarner, after she pleaded with Warner’s wife) she went for Melanie
Hamilton, dignified, loving and forgiving, rather than the flighty
Scarlett O’Hara. There were deeply feminine qualities in her she
wanted to explore. She did so largely by herself, after a good read of
Stanislavsky’s “An Actor’s Work”; in costume as Melanie, she would
keep going back to commune with her in the dressing-room mir-
ror. One day, still struggling, she asked Jimmy Cagney for advice.
“Whatever you say, mean it,” he snapped. She made sure she did.
And she always had. To act had been her dream from the age of
five, when she found her actress-mother’s make-up box and
smeared her cheeks with rouge that would not come off. It grew
steadily through the childhood elocution lessons, the Shake-
speare-reading sessions and a local production of “Alice in Won-
derland” in which she seemed to move in an enchanted world.
(Her younger sister Joan, treading annoyingly on her heels, wanted
just the same career and, as Joan Fontaine, got much of it, until
their mutual snubbing became legendary.) Yet even after her big
break, playing Hermia in Max Reinhardt’s “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934, to sign at once with a studio
was terrifying. She was 18, and felt she was jumping off an Olympic
diving board with no idea how to dive. That was before she found
that pretty little women were hardly required to act.
Almost as fast as Warner Bros kept offering her brainless work,
she declined it. After all, her favourite pursuit was to do cryptic
crosswords. But the studio had a hold on her. Each time she turned
down a role her contract was suspended, and the days not worked
were added as time owed. Infuriated, she took the studio to court
in 1943 and won, as she was pretty sure she would. Henceforth, un-
der the De Havilland Law of 1945, actors were employed for proper
calendar terms and the studio stranglehold was ended.
It was no coincidence that she did her best work after that. In
“To Each His Own”, she played a mother trying over decades to re-
trieve the child she had given up, carefully changing her perfume
to fix the character as she aged. In “The Heiress” she portrayed a
woman who was shy and plain; scorned by her father and betrayed
by her fortune-seeking lover, she took a calm, cold revenge on both
of them. For “The Snake Pit” (1948) she became a wife sent by her
husband to a mental asylum, striving to keep her dignity while as-
sailed by inner demons. To research the role she consulted psy-
chiatrists and visited a mental hospital to watch electric-shock
treatment, with the horror of the body rising and forcibly held
down. She knew just a little of constraint like that.
She was alert to other curbs on her freedom, too. She avoided
marrying her leading men, preferring to carry on discreetly with
several, including Errol (unconsummated, she insisted, despite
eight films together), Jimmy Stewart and John Huston. Instead she
married writers, promptly divorcing them when mutual interest
faded. In the mid-1940s, though ardently liberal, she resigned from
the liberal Citizens’ Committee to protest against the leadership’s
pro-Soviet line, and even informed the fbisecretly about them. No
other voice or group should dare to speak for her, or use her.
Her strongest bid for independence came in mid-life, when she
left Hollywood behind. In 1955, having married a Frenchman, she
went to live in Paris for the next 60 years. In her 19th-century man-
sion she would float about magnificently in Chinese silk and
pearls, with a glass of Veuve Clicquot in her hand. Her screen work
became rarer; she did not keep company with actors and directors,
but with Voltaire and Monet. Real as she had made her characters,
what she most loved now was actual authenticity: houses and
churches made of stone, not canvas, and real princes to meet. On a
visit to Beverly Hills in 1957 she bumped into Errol again, at a chari-
ty ball, and was surprised by the deadness of his eyes.
California stayed in her mind, however. She mused to Vanity
Fair that if she could not come back to Earth as herself, a role she
found perfectly satisfactory, she would like to be a redwood tree.
Strong, deep-rooted, benevolent, tall— and reaching in unimped-
ed splendour for the sun, the moon and the stars. 7Dame Olivia de Havilland, the last great star of Hollywood’s
Golden Age, died on July 26th, aged 104The ingénue who roared
Obituary Olivia de Havilland