Olivia de Havilland at the Oscars March 23, 2003
Actress De Havilland Recalls Golden Era
Interview - April 16, 2003
At 86, Olivia de Havilland retains her classic loveliness.
The two-time Oscar winner, who made a rare trip to Hollywood from her Paris home last month to help celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Academy Awards, wore a simple black dress and pearls for an interview at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
A charming storyteller, she exudes serenity, even in the face of two failed marriages and long, devastating illnesses that claimed the lives of her son and second husband.
De Havilland was born in Tokyo to a father who was a British patent attorney and a mother who had been an actress. The couple divorced when she was 3, and her mother brought her and her younger sister (who became actress Joan Fontaine) to California, settling on the peninsula south of San Francisco.
When did she decide to become an actress?
"I didn't really know what I wanted to be in life when I was graduating from high school," de Havilland said. "I had been in school plays and won a scholarship to Mills College, which had a celebrated drama and speech arts course. While I was at Mills, I thought I would find out what I wanted to be."
During the summer after high school, she played Puck in an amateur production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Hearing that producer-director Max Reinhardt was coming to California to stage the play, she asked permission to attend rehearsals.
She ended up playing Hermia in the lavish production at the Hollywood Bowl. Warner Bros. decided to film the play and hired Reinhardt and two of the actors, de Havilland and Mickey Rooney, who played Puck. The studio offered her the role of Hermia in the 1935 film on condition that she sign a long-term contract.
"After `Dream,' they put me in `Alibi Ike,' a baseball picture with Joe E. Brown," she recalled with dismay. That was followed by a string of mostly forgettable films that capitalized on her youthful beauty.
She does cherish two movies from those early years: "Captain Blood" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood," both with Errol Flynn, and both huge hits.
Her opinion of Flynn: "He was a devil, he teased me, he was unfair and very hard to work with. But nonetheless, those films did work."
During her glory years, de Havilland was squired to Hollywood events by a number of handsome men, notably Jimmy Stewart and Howard Hughes.
"Jimmy had wanted to take me to a party at the (David O.) Selznicks," she recalled. "Howard had already told me that he intended to take me to it. I told both of them I couldn't go because I was terribly sick with a throat infection.
"Hughes insisted that I should go despite my 101-degree temperature. So we arrived, and who should be sitting in the bar but Jimmy Stewart, who was the single client of the bartender, who was Errol Flynn. We had drinks, and I danced for six hours and went home without a temperature."
"Gone With the Wind" marked a leap forward for de Havilland, who played Melanie Hamilton opposite Clark Gable (Rhett Butler) and Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara). The genius behind the 1939 epic, she observed, was producer David O. Selznick, who retained his "undying vision" despite changes of directors.
After a year in preparation and a few weeks of directing, George Cukor was dumped for Victor Fleming. When Fleming collapsed from overwork, he was replaced by Sam Wood, who stayed on after Fleming returned.
"You would be working in the morning with Sam Wood on one set," de Havilland recalled, "and in the afternoon with Victor on another set. I don't think that ever happened before."
She agreed that Gable was probably responsible for Cukor's firing.
"I think that Clark was very upset early in shooting by the bazaar scene in which Melanie gives a passionate speech about the South," she said. "That, I think, unnerved him, because he didn't know what he was doing in the scene. It could be that Clark thought that George was throwing the picture to the two actresses. I thought I did the scene very well. But in fact it was unnecessary, and it was cut."
Fleming was more to Gable's liking; they had worked together at MGM and were hunting buddies. But Leigh and de Havilland didn't totally abandon Cukor: they went to his home at night for surreptitious coaching.
De Havilland won a supporting-actress Oscar nomination for "Gone With the Wind" and a best-actress nomination for 1941's "Hold Back the Dawn" — both loanouts. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. was still casting her in Westerns and romantic comedies.
De Havilland won her revenge in 1944. She'd been suspended for refusing scripts, and the studio had added the time off to the length of her contract. She sued and won a decision that contracts could not extend beyond seven calendar years. For that she earned the undying gratitude of her fellow actors.
She used her new independence wisely, collecting best-actress Oscars for 1946's "To Each His Own" and 1949's "The Heiress." She also was nominated for a best-actress Oscar for 1948's "The Snake Pit."
Then, in 1953, she abruptly left Hollywood to live in Paris.
"You knew that the whole (Hollywood) era of which you had been a part was coming to an end," she explained. "Whatever replaced it would not resemble it. A pall hung over this city. I had to rethink my whole life in a place that was coming to an end."
Another factor was involved. De Havilland had divorced author Marcus Goodrich and had won custody of their son, Benjamin. Yet she feared Goodrich might sue for partial custody.
An invitation to the Cannes Film Festival proved serendipitous. She met a charming Frenchman, Pierre Galante, editor of Paris Match magazine.
"I found France a very refreshing experience," she said. "The French were just recovering from the war and the occupation, which was humiliating for them. The embers of their civilization were just beginning to produce little flickers of flame."
She and Galante married and had a daughter, Gisele, who accompanied her mother to this year's Academy Awards celebration.
De Havilland appeared in films only occasionally after settling in France, including the TV docu-dramas "The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana," "Anastasia" and "The Woman He Loved."
She stopped acting in the late 1980s and for a decade provided care during the long and painful illnesses of her son and former husband. Benjamin, who had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease at 19, died at 42 in 1991. Galante, whom she divorced in 1979, died of lung cancer in 1998.
De Havilland has no plans to leave Paris, where she recently redecorated her three-story house near the Bois de Bologne.
"I know this is not a popular thing to say at this moment, but I love living among the French," she said, referring to France's refusal to support the U.S.-led war on Iraq. "They are very independent, intelligent, well-educated and creative. They are a people full of feeling, which they express. They're a vivacious people. Well, they're Celts, you see."
Olivia de Havilland at the Oscars March 24, 1950
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