Gone with the Wind star Olivia de Havilland dies at 104

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Olivia de Havilland, a star of Hollywood’s golden age and a two-time Academy Award winning actress, has died aged 104.

The British-American Dame, best-known for her role as Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939), died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Paris, France on Saturday, Entertainment Weekly reports.

Less than a month earlier, de Havilland, who had been the oldest surviving star of the classic movie, had celebrated her birthday on July 1.

De Havilland enjoyed a remarkable life and career, even winning two Best Actress Oscars for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949) respectively.

Born in Tokyo in 1916, de Havilland was the older sister of fellow actress Joan Fontaine. They moved to California with their actress-mother Lillian in 1919 after their father Walter, a British patent attorney, absconded with their housekeeper.  

De Havilland and Fontaine shared one of the longest sibling rivalries and feuds in the film industry. 

The roots of the estrangement were never made public, but the rift was said to have been spurred professional competition that may have even been stoked by their mother.

Both of the sisters were nominated for the 1942 Best Actress Oscar, which Fontaine won for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Suspicion’. 

De Havilland had been nominated for Hold Back the Dawn, in which she starred alongside Charles Boyer as a shy American schoolteacher who’s manipulated by a Romanian gigolo.

A series of high-profile spats between the sisters followed, usually concerning desired movie roles or vying for the affections of powerful men, such as billionaire Howard Hughes.

They reconciled a number of times over the years, however their relationship would end permanently after the death of their mother in 1975, after Fontaine was not initially invited to the memorial service.

To promote her 1978 memoir, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine said: ‘You can divorce your sister as well as your husbands. I don’t see her at all and I don’t intend to.

‘I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it!’ she told the Hollywood reporter at the time. 

When Joan Fontaine died in December 2013, De Havilland released a statement saying she was ‘shocked and saddened’. 

De Havilland made her on-screen debut in Max Reinhardt’s elaborate 1935 adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

However, her big break came later that year when she appeared with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, and then with the same legendary leading man in The Adventures of the Robin Hood in 1938. 

Flynn and De Havilland were rumored to be lovers, although Ms De Havilland said in an interview in 2009 ‘nothing did ever happen between us,’ adding: ‘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.’ 

De Havilland signed a long-term contract with Warner Brother’s Studios and she went to star along side Flynn in seven other films. 

Gone with the Wind recently hit the headlines after HBO Max removed the picture from its service, before re-adding it with a few additions including a new introduction discussing the film’s controversial depiction of slavery in the South.

Meanwhile, in 2018, Olivia famously took legal action against FX and Ryan Murphy, after she said that Murphy never sought her permission to depict her or use her name in his drama Feud: Bette & Joan. 

The eight-episode series about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis saw Olivia played by fellow Oscar-winner Catherine Zeta-Jones, however, the lawsuit was later dismissed. 

Interestingly, Olivia is said to have had her own feud with actress-sister Joan, who was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, which could certainly give Murphy something to chew over for his next project. 

TShe also added, ‘I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she’ll be furious, because again I’ll have got there first!’

Olivia looked radiant in 2011, when she attended the 36th Cesar Awards – the French Oscars – at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. 

Her acting career spanned six decades and continued into the late eighties, and she played Queen Elizbaeth, The Queen Mother in the American TV movie The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana in 1982. 

The actress had two marriages, to screenwriter Marcus Goodrich from 1946 to 1953, and Pierre Galante, from 1955 to 1979. 

Her first child with Marcus, a son named Benjamin Goodrich, died at the age of 42 of heart disease brought on by his suffering with Hodgkin’s disease. 

She had her second child, daughter Gisèle Galante, with husband Pierre, who was executive editor for the French journal Paris Match. Olivia’s marriage to Pierre meant a relocation to Paris where she remains to this day.

In 2017, Olivia became the oldest individual to be named a Dame.

Talking about the honor at the time, Olivia said in a statement that she was ‘extremely proud that the Queen has appointed me a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.’