De Havilland was the older sister of actress Joan Fontaine, who also was blessed with longevity though not living as long as Olivia. She died in 2013 at the age of 96. The sisters were reputed to have engaged in lifelong sibling rivalry, which I think was more on the part of Joan than of Olivia, and supposedly they were permanently estranged after their mother died in the mid-1970s. I doubt this, though, because it has also been said both women did talk to each other on the phone in their later years. Joan lived in California, while Olivia lived for decades in Paris. It also has been said the sisters visited each other fairly often.
The rivalry was likely exaggerated by the press, which always loved a good story. At least this is what I hoped happened.
De Havilland also garnered an Oscar, this one for her outstanding role in The Heiress. This was one of two she earned, the other being for her role in To Each His Own. She probably should have earned an Oscar for GWTW, but Vivien Leigh was given the award for Best Actress. De Havilland should have been nominated for the lead role, not a supporting role, which she was, but she lost that to co-star Hattie McDaniel. Not that Leigh didn't deserve it, but De Havilland's performance was very good and difficult not to overact the "sweet Melanie Wilkes" part. Leigh, though, was in almost every scene, so she couldn't be overlooked.
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| At least Joan didn't knife Olivia in the back |
De Havilland was also known for her co-starring roles with Errol Flynn, and they were always the subject of gossip over the decades. However, they never were an item in real life, though they were said to have had crushes on each other. Nothing happened, and that was that. It probably spared Olivia a lot of grief, not to mention an early widowhood, as Flynn died way back in 1959, aged only 50 and after a lot of years of hard living. Despite this, Olivia always spoke highly of him.
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Born in Tokyo in 1916, “Livvie,” her younger sister Joan Fontaine (herself an Oscar-winning actress, for Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1941 Suspicion“) and their actress-mother Lillian moved to California in 1919 after their father Walter, a British patent attorney, took up with the housekeeper.
A Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Nights Dream led to Olivia’s contract in 1935 with Warner Bros., which produced a movie version of the Shakespeare comedy. Reprising her role as Hernia, de Havilland started costarring the following year with the studio’s great swashbuckler Errol Flynn, and, in eight films together, the duo became one of the great screen teams of their time.
One of her most notable appearances in her later years:
NYT:
The formula roles kept coming. When Ms. de Havilland complained, she was told that she had been hired because she photographed well and that she wasn’t required to act.
The studio had misread her determination. She began to refuse roles she considered inferior. Warner retaliated by suspending her several times, for a total of six months, and, after her contract expired, insisting that because of the suspensions she was still the studio’s property for six more months.
Ms. de Havilland sued. The case dragged on for a year and a half but David finally beat Goliath when the California Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling in her favor in 1945. What became known as the de Havilland decision established that a studio could not arbitrarily extend the duration of an actor’s contract.
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