Olivia de Havilland was one of the great stars of Hollywood’s Golden Era of the 1930s and ‘40s. The classic film star passed away peacefully at her home in Paris, France on July 25th, 2020 at age 104.
She was a remarkable person. Elegant, graceful, tough, smart, and interesting—that’s how she presented in every role she took on and it’s certainly the way she presented off the screen as well. In an interview she gave when she was 90, she said that she was initially always cast as what she called “the love interest.” The movies were all about what she described as “the route to the marriage bed.” These kinds of roles quickly lost their appeal for her.
“You can’t imagine how uninteresting that route could be,” she said. “I longed to play a character who initiated things, who experienced important things, who interpreted the great agonies and joys of human experience.”
Okay, I’m on board with Olivia de Havilland.
Her background may surprise you: She was born in 1916 in Tokyo, where her English father was a professor at the Imperial University. She and her younger sister Joan (who grew up to be the actress Joan Fontaine) were sickly children and her parents decided to return to England for their health. They set sail and landed in San Francisco on their way to Europe. There, they were promptly abandoned by their caddish and philandering father, so de Havilland’s mother decided to stay in the Bay Area. Olivia and Joan became California girls. Being abandoned by her father at 4 years old and raised by a single mother turned her from a frail “ailing child” into a determined and endlessly interesting actress and person.
De Havilland was a courageous, independent woman. She demanded roles that appealed to her and she vigorously fought the old studio system; at the time, actors were effectively made into indentured servants by the studios who had them under contract and they had to appear in the films that the studios told them to. In 1943, de Havilland sued Warner Brothers and won a significant legal victory over them that resulted in greater freedom for all artists, not just for herself or other actors.
In all of her performances, she projects a graceful and elegant persona, but underneath is a steely sense of grit and resolve. She tells the story of sitting on the steps outside a sound stage when she and Errol Flynn were shooting Captain Blood (1935). She said Flynn turned to her and asked : “What do you want out of life?”
Her answer: “I would like respect for difficult work well done.”
I think we can all say she accomplished that and more. She had a long and brilliant career, was nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Actress, winning twice, and has received numerous other honors, including the prestigious Dame Commander of the British Empire (OBE) in 2017.
Here are some of my favorite Olivia de Havilland movies.
I love this movie, but to be honest it’s my second favorite of all the Robin Hood movies. Top honors go to Robin and Marian (1976), a melancholy version that starred Sean Connery as a creaky and exhausted middle-aged Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn as an independent woman who became a nun while he was out galavanting on the Crusades. This 1938 version is a more traditional telling of the Robin Hood tale. After the enormous success of Captain Blood, Warner Brothers reunited de Havilland and Flynn again, this time as Maid Marian and Sir Robin of Locksley. Basil Rathbone is the bad guy, Sir Guy of Gisborne. The swordplay! The romance! The thrilling adventures and the happy ending! What more do you want out of a movie? As I say, it’s the second best Robin Hood movie of them all.
This is a difficult movie for me to write about objectively because I believe it romanticized and put a hazy gloss of respectability on the slaveholding class, which has had a pernicious impact on our culture that we continue to see being played out to this day. Let’s set that aside for a minute. Well, let’s set that aside for 221 minutes of the movie’s running time. Here, de Havilland has her more famous role—Melanie Hamilton. Melanie is Scarlett O’Hara’s romantic rival for the affections of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), a complicated romantic entanglement that ropes in the dashing , and cavalier Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). But you already know all this. You’ve no doubt seen this movie a few (dozen) times by now. This time, I want you to watch to pay attention to de Havilland’s performance. Her Melanie enters the film as a traditional and somewhat frivolous Southern belle, but emerges as a strong and independent woman. For me, de Havilland’s Melanie is the single most appealing feature of a film I have significant issues with. I’ll always watch it for Melanie.
Although largely forgotten today, Ellen Glasgow was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of her time. Born to an aristocratic Virginia family in the 1870s, she primarily wrote about the lives of women, particularly Southern women, in an honest, unsentimental style. Her final novel was In This Our Life, and it was a huge bestseller and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1942. The film adaptation was a prestige project for Warner Bros. It was directed by John Huston from the adapted screenplay by Howard Koch, who went on to win an Academy Award as one of the writers on Casablanca (1942). The story is a melodramatic tale of two sisters, oddly named Roy (de Havilland) and Stanley (Bette Davis). We open on Stanley running off with Roy’s husband a week before Stanley’s wedding to another man. Davis is in her full-blown strong, dangerous, “Bette Davis eyes” persona here, but de Havilland’s performance as the wronged sister delivers some of her best work.
The story of a sisterly rivalry probably came quite easily to de Havilland because it was widely known that she and her sister, Joan Fontaine, were at odds most of their lives. Who were the two male leads? Oh, who cares? Your eyes are on Davis and de Havilland every minute they are on the screen. There is also a strong second story about race. Stanley gets drunk one night and kills a family in a hit and run accident and tries to pin the blame on a young African-American man who works for her father’s law firm. Does she get away with it? Well, you’re just going to have to rent this, aren’t you? Melodramas don’t get much better than this one. And maybe it’s time to start rereading Ellen Glasgow. (Side note: de Havilland and Huston started a romance during the making of this movie that lasted three years!)
This, for me, is de Havilland’s finest performance. Here she plays a young woman, Virginia Cunningham, who is hospitalized for schizophrenia. She is in a full psychotic break when the film opens—hearing voices, seeing things, and unable to recognize her husband. The film then tells the story of what happened to her and the various treatments she received. There’s a cruel nurse, of course, Nurse Davis (Helen Craig), who torments Virginia out of petty jealousy and gets her placed in the unit for those deemed untreatable, nicknamed “The Snake Pit.” This was one of the first movies to deal with mental health issues and mental health treatment in such a brutally honest way. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward that had been an enormous bestseller, the film sparked a national discussion on the treatment of mental health and exposed many of the cruelties in how it was practiced during those times. De Havilland was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. It was directed by the great Anatole Litvak, who also co-directed the seven-film World War II documentary series Why We Fight (1942-1945) with Frank Capra. This is a drama not to be missed.
This film was directed by William Wyler, who is somewhat unremembered now but is one of the greatest figures in American film. He won the Oscar for Best Director three times for Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Ben Hur (1959). He also cast Audrey Hepburn in her first film, Roman Holiday (1953). I could go on and on about William Wyler, and perhaps I will in another post. Laurence Olivier claims that Wyler taught him how to act for film during the shooting of Wuthering Heights (1939). And oops, there I am going on and on about him. De Havilland already knew what she was doing when Wyler directed her in this film. And he got an Academy Award-winning performance here out of her.
This is a really good melodrama about a naïve young woman, an heiress, with an emotionally abusive father (Ralph Richardson). She finds love with a handsome young man (Montgomery Clift), whom the father suspects—and with good reason—to be a gold digger. It’s a heart-breaking story and among the more compelling dramas you will see. This is the movie to watch after you put the kids to bed, have gotten into your jammies, and are all snuggled up under a blanket on the couch. Oh and a box of Kleenex nearby might be advisable. Great performance here by de Havilland. It was her second Oscar for Best Actress, and rightly so.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.