Actors - Olivia de Havilland

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	Actors - Olivia de Havilland

Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1 1916) is an Oscar-winning Japanese-born American film actress.

Early life

Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan, and is the elder daughter of Walter de Havilland, a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and the former Lilian Augusta Ruse, an actress known by her stage name of Lilian (or Lillian) Fontaine, who married in 1914. Her father was the half-brother of the late Charles de Havilland, who was the father of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, the famous aviation pioneer (who died in 1946). Her younger sister is the actress Joan Fontaine (also born in Tokyo, on October 22, 1917), from whom she has been famously estranged for many decades, not speaking at all since 1975.

De Havilland's family moved from Tokyo when she was two years old, settling in Saratoga, California. She attended school at Los Gatos High School and at the Notre Dame Convent Catholic girls' school in Belmont, California. Subsequently, an acting award at Los Gatos is named after her.

Career

De Havilland's career began co-starring with Joe E. Brown in Alibi Ike in 1935. She appeared as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream
, her first stage production, at the Hollywood Bowl. The stage production was later turned into a 1935 movie with the same cast. De Havilland played opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films as Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and as Maid Marian to Flynn's Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938). She played Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind
(1939) and received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance. Out of the four stars of Gone with the Wind (the others being Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard), she is the only one who is still alive. Ironically, her character was the only of the four who died in the film.

In 1941, Olivia became a naturalized citizen of the United States. De Havilland and her sister were each nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1942. Fontaine won first for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) over de Havilland's nomination for Hold Back the Dawn
(1941).

Biographer Charles Higham has described the events of the awards ceremony, stating that as Fontaine stepped forward to collect her award, she had pointedly rejected de Havilland's attempts at congratulating her and that de Havilland was both offended and embarrassed by her behavior. Several years later, de Havilland would return the favor and brush by Fontaine, waiting with her hand extended, because Olivia had allegedly taken offense at a comment Joan made about Olivia's then-husband. He records that the sisters always had an uneasy relationship, even since early childhood, when Olivia would rip up the clothes Joan had to wear as hand-me-downs, forcing Joan to sew them back together. Both sisters have refused to comment, but Higham has stated that the above described event in 1942 was the final straw for what would become a lifelong feud, but this is debatable, given de Haviland's later retaliation, and also the events of 1975, which were at least as notable milestones as the incident Higham describes from 1942. The sisters finally ceased to speak at all in 1975, because, according to Fontaine, de Havilland had not invited her to a memorial service for their late mother, Lilian de Havilland, who had recently died, although Olivia claims she told Joan and Joan brushed her off saying she was too busy to attend. The truth is hard to get when one is faced with two different versions of the same event (and probably many other events as well).

By this time, de Havilland was becoming increasingly frustrated by the roles being assigned to her. She felt that she had proven herself to be capable of playing more than the demure ingenues and damsels in distress that were quickly typecasting her, and began to reject scripts that offered her this type of role. The law allowed for studios to suspend contract players for rejecting a role and the period of suspension to be added to the contract period. In theory this allowed a studio to maintain indefinite control over an uncooperative contractee. Most accepted this situation, while a few tried to change the system; Bette Davis had mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against Warner Bros in the 1930s. De Havilland mounted a lawsuit in the 1940s and was successful, thereby reducing the power of the studios and extending greater creative freedom to the performers. The decision was one of the most significant and far reaching legal rulings until that time in Hollywood. Her courage in mounting such a challenge, and her subsequent victory, won her the respect and admiration of her peers. The court's rulling came to be known, and is still known to this day as the de Havilland law.

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Actors - Olivia de Havilland

Early life

Career

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