Gone with the Wind actress Olivia de Havilland was one of the last remaining Old Hollywood
stars when she died at age 104 on July 25, 2020.
The two-time Oscar winner made her mark on the silver screen, but there's so much to
learn about her life and career.
This is the truth about Olivia de Havilland.
There have been some legendary Hollywood feuds over the years, yet few can compare to the
animosity between Olivia de Havilland and sister Joan Fontaine.
The sibling rivalry reportedly began in childhood and never abated.
While promoting her 1978 memoir, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine described their relationship
to People.
She lamented,
"I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood."
Asked how their relationship was at the time, Fontaine was quoted as saying,
"You can divorce your sister as well as your husbands.
I don't see her at all and I don't intend to."
The rivalry hit its zenith when both siblings were nominated for best actress at the 1942
Academy Awards.
When Fontaine won, she recalled in her memoir,
"I felt Olivia would spring across the table and grab me by the hair.
I felt age four, being confronted by my older sister.
Damn it, I'd incurred her wrath again!"
Speaking to the Associated Press in 2016, a few years after her younger sister's death,
de Havilland reflected on their relationship, saying,
"On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in the later years, severed."
By the mid-1950s, Olivia de Havilland was nearing 40, an age when actresses of that
era were considered well past their sell-by dates.
Still, with two Oscars to her credit, de Havilland was still a bankable star when she pulled
up stakes in Los Angeles in 1955 and moved to Paris after marrying Paris Match editor
Pierre Galante.
As de Havilland told Vanity Fair in 2016, she was struck by the contrast between the
artifice of Hollywood and the authenticity of Paris.
She explained,
"I loved being around real buildings, real castles, real churches not ones made of canvas.
There were real cobblestones.
Somehow the cobblestones amazed me.
When I would meet a prince or a duke, he was a real prince, a real duke."
In 1962, de Havilland chronicled her fish-out-of-water experiences as an expat Hollywood star living
in the City of Lights, writing her memoir, Every Frenchman Has One.
Gone with the Wind brought Olivia de Havilland her first Oscar nomination for best supporting
actress at the 1940 edition of the Academy Awards.
Also nominated in that same category was Hattie McDaniel, who played the kind hearted character
of Mammy.
When McDaniel received the award, she made history as the first person of color to ever
win an Oscar.
De Havilland's initial reaction to McDaniel's historic win was extreme disappointment.
She told Entertainment Weekly in 2015,
"When I returned home on Oscar night, aged 23 and the loser of the award...I was convinced
there was no God."
However, de Havilland was later able to put her loss in perspective, and even came up
with a rationalization to explain it: she was simply nominated in the wrong category,
and should have been up for best actress.
As she told Entertainment Weekly,
"About two weeks later, I woke up and thought, 'Oh, how wonderful!
I wasn't a supporting actress, and Hattie was, and she won!
Those blessed voters were not misled for one minute...I'd rather live in a world where
someone who is a supporting actress wins against someone who, instead, is a star playing a
starring role!...There is a God, after all!'"
Olivia de Havilland had some high-profile beaus in her day, including fellow movie star
Jimmy Stewart and aviation mogul Howard Hughes.
Rumors also persisted that she and frequent co-star Errol Flynn had a torrid affair speculation
primarily based on their sizzling onscreen chemistry in the eight films in which they'd
co-starred.
However, de Havilland set the record straight about her relationship with Flynn on several
occasions, admitting that it was a complicated dynamic.
She told The Independent in 2009,
"What I felt for Errol Flynn was not a trivial matter at all.
I felt terribly attracted to him.
And do you know, I still feel it.
I still feel very close to him to this day."
She elaborated that same year in an interview with The Telegraph, admitting,
"We did fall in love and I believe that this is evident in the screen chemistry between
us...I have not talked about it a great deal but the relationship was not consummated.
Chemistry was there though.
It was there."
By the early 1940s, Olivia de Havilland had grown frustrated with the roles coming to
her.
Within the Hollywood studio system at the time, actors were forced into exclusive contracts
that controlled every aspect of their lives.
As de Havilland told the Independent,
"You were a great celebrity but also a slave...Whatever private life you had left to you didn't belong
to you but the studio publicists."
In 1943, de Havilland stood up to the Hollywood establishment by suing Warner Bros. under
California's anti-peonage law.
De Havilland, whose father was a lawyer, explained the situation that she faced with her lawsuit,
saying,
"Everyone in Hollywood knew that I would lose but I knew that I would win.
I had read the law.
I knew what the studios were doing was wrong."
The court sided with de Havilland.
The California Court of Appeal ruled she couldn't be forced to work beyond seven years of her
contract, and the ruling became state law.
She told the Independent,
"From then on I could choose my own material and play roles that really interested me.
Very soon after my victory, To Each His Own came along and brought me not only my third
nomination for the Academy Award but also my first Oscar."
While Olivia de Havilland never acted on her attraction to co-star Errol Flynn, one of
her first real romances was with fellow movie star Jimmy Stewart.
The two actors dated for a couple of years, but broke up before Stewart enlisted in the
U.S. Armed Forces in 1941.
When Stewart returned to Hollywood after World War II, his first movie role as a civilian
was one that would become one of his most iconic: George Bailey in the holiday classic,
It's a Wonderful Life.
As de Havilland told People, she was offered the role of George's wife Mary...but turned
it down.
"Why don't you kiss her instead of talking her to death?"
"You want me to kiss her, huh?"
De Havilland explained her decision in an interview with People in 2016,
"It would have meant playing opposite Jimmy Stewart, home from the wars.
I knew it would be awkward to work with him because of our many months together in a sort
of high school pre-war romance, which came to an end."
She also described Stewart as, quote, "a very complex man [who] revealed himself to very
few people."
Victoria Amador was reportedly just 13 years old and living in rural Wisconsin when she
sent a fan letter to Olivia de Havilland.
A few weeks later, a letter arrived with a French postmark, containing an autographed
photo of de Havilland as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes.
Amador and de Havilland continued corresponding for decades, with Amador eventually asking
if she could visit the actress in person but De Havilland continually turned down those
requests.
Amador went on to earn a doctorate in creative writing and American literature, becoming
a university professor.
While teaching in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s, she finally received the response she'd been
hoping for when de Havilland invited her to visit her Paris home.
At that point, they'd been corresponding for 43 years.
As Amador told the newspaper, she met with de Havilland four more times over the ensuing
years, sipping champagne and snacking on canapes during chats that lasted for hours.
Amador informed de Havilland she planned to write a book about her life, and the actress
did not object.
The resulting book, Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant, was published in May 2019.
Olivia de Havilland's portrayal of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind earned
her the first of five Academy Award nominations.
She would go on to win two Oscars, taking home the award for best actress in 1947 for
her performance in To Each His Own, and winning best actress again in 1950 for The Heiress.
When the former actress celebrated her 104th birthday on July 1, 2020, she held the record
as the oldest living Oscar winner.
More than 60 years after winning that second Oscar, de Havilland returned to the Academy
Awards for the 75th annual ceremony, greeted with a standing ovation that lasted nearly
a full minute.
The 2017 FX miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan chronicled the fractious relationship between
duelling Hollywood stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford played by Susan Sarandon and Jessica
Lange while filming their 1964 horror hit, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
In a small role, Catherine Zeta-Jones played Olivia de Havilland who was so displeased
with the portrayal that she sued.
According to de Havilland's attorneys, producers made no attempt to obtain permission to use
her name and likeness, and further portrayed her in a false manner, peddling gossip and
rumors instead of facts.
As de Havilland told The New York Times,
"When I then learned that the Olivia de Havilland character called my sister Joan 'a b----'
and gossiped about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's personal and private relationship, I was deeply
offended."
Eventually, de Havilland's case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately
denied her petition.
Her lawyers said of the court's decision,
"One day someone else who is wronged for the sake of Hollywood profits will have the courage
to stand on the shoulders of Miss de Havilland and fight for the right to defend their good
name and legacy against intentional, unconsented exploitation and falsehoods."
In 2017, de Havilland received an honor both rare and royal when she was named a Dame Commander
of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
At age 100, the Gone with the Wind star made history as the oldest person ever to receive
that distinction.
In a statement, she declared,
"To receive this honor as my 101st birthday approaches is the most gratifying of birthday
presents."
However, de Havilland didn't actually receive her DBE until the following year, and never
met the queen in person.
In an odd bit of coincidence, one of de Havilland's final acting gigs was portraying the mother
of the woman who had made her a Dame Commander.
As The Washington Post reported at the time, she played Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother,
in the 1982 made-for-TV movie The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana.
"You've done well, you two.
Now come, my children.
Come greet all of Britain."
Olivia de Havilland was certainly not a typical centenarian.
In 2016, the actress told Entertainment Weekly that she was eagerly anticipating her milestone
100th birthday:
"Oh, I can't wait for it.
I'm certainly relishing the idea of living a century.
Can you imagine that?
What an achievement."
As one of the Golden Age of Hollywood's last remaining stars, de Havilland clearly refused
to slow down as she got older, earning praise from peers and making headlines until her
death of natural causes.
The movie icon previously shared her thoughts on what she'd like her final moments on the
planet to be like while taking Vanity Fair's Proust questionnaire back in 2005.
She declared,
"I would prefer to live forever in perfect health, but if I must at some time leave this
life I would like to do so ensconced on a chaise lounge, perfumed, wearing a velvet
robe and pearl earrings, with a flute of champagne beside me and having just discovered the answer
to the last problem in a British cryptic crossword."
We sincerely hope she got her wish.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Nicki Swift videos about your favorite actors and celebrities are coming
soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.