Olivia Mary de Havilland was born to a British patent attorney and his wife on July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan. Her sister, Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old and moved with the remaining family to Los Angeles, California. After graduating from high school, where she fell prey to the acting bug, Olivia enrolled in Mills College in Oakland. It was while she was at Mills that she participated in the school play, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and was spotted by Max Reinhardt. She so impressed Reinhardt that he picked her up for both his stage version and, later, the Warner Bros. film version in 1935. She, again, was so impressive that Warner executives signed her to a seven-year contract. No sooner had the ink dried on the contract than Olivia appeared in three more films: The Irish in Us, Alibi Ike and Captain Blood, the latter with the man with whom her career would be most closely identified: heartthrob Errol Flynn. He and Olivia starred together in eight films during their careers. In 1939 Warner Bros. loaned her to David O. Selznick for the classic Gone with the Wind. Playing the sweet Melanie Hamilton, Olivia received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, only losing out to one of her co-stars in the film, Hattie McDaniel. After GWTW, Olivia returned to Warner Bros. and continued to churn out films. In 1941 she played Emmy Brown in The Golden Door, which resulted in her second nomination for an Oscar, this time for Best Actress. Again she lost, this time to her sister Joan for her role in Suspicion. After that strong showing, Olivia now demanded better, more substantial roles than the "sweet young thing" slot into which Warners had been fitting her. The studio responded by placing her on a six-month suspension, all of the studios at the time operating under the policy that players were nothing more than property to do with as they saw fit. If that wasn't bad enough, when her contract with Warners was up, she was told that she would have to make up the lost time because of the suspension. Irate, she sued the studio, and over the length of the court battle she didn't appear in a single film. The result, however, was worth the wait. In a landmark decision, the courts said that not only did Olivia not have to make up the time, but all performers were to be limited to a seven-year contract which would include any suspensions handed down. This became known as the "De Havilland Law". Now studios couldn't treat their performers as mere cattle. Returning to screen in 1946, Olivia made up for lost time by appearing in four films, and it was one of those that finally won her the Oscar that had so long eluded her. It was To Each His Own, in which she played Josephine Norris to the delight of critics and audiences alike. Olivia was the strongest performer in Hollywood for the balance of the 1940s. In 1948 she turned in another strong showing in The Snake Pit as Virginia Cunningham, a woman suffering a mental breakdown. The end result was another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but she lost to Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda. As in the two previous years, she made only one film in 1949, but again won a nomination and the Academy Award for Best Actress in The Heiress. After a three-year hiatus, Olivia returned to star in My Cousin Rachel. From that point on she made few appearances on the screen, but was seen on Broadway and some television shows. Her last screen appearance was The Fifth Musketeer, and her last career appearance was in the TV movie The Woman He Loved. During the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of GWTW in 1989, she graciously declined requests for all interviews as the only surviving member of the four main stars. Today she enjoys a quiet retirement in Paris, France.



Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964): $100 000
Raffles (1939): $1,250/week
Gone with the Wind (1939): $25,000

Olivia's cousin was Sir Geoffrey de Havilland (1882-1965), the British aviation pioneer and designer of aircraft such as the wartime Mosquito fighter. Daughter of film and stage actress Lillian Fontaine. After her divorce from second husband Pierre Galante in 1979 they remained close friends, and after Galante became ill with cancer she nursed him until his death in 1998. Justly famous for her court victory against Warner Brothers in the mid 1940s (many others had sued Warners but failed), which stopped Warners from adding suspension periods to actors' contracts and therefore meant more freedom for actors in Hollywood. It became known as the "de Havilland decision". Showed flair as a writer when "Every Fenchman Has One," a lighthearted autobiographical account of her attempts at adapting to French life, was published in 1962. Lost her son Benjamin to Hodgkin's disease in 1991, shortly before Benjamin's father, writer Marcus Goodrich, passed away. Turned down the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), allegedly stating that "A lady just doesn't say or do those things on the screen". De Havilland set the record straight in a 2006 interview, saying that she had recently given birth to her son when offered the part and was unable to relate to the material. Her father, Walter Augustus de Havilland (1872-1968), was a patent attorney in Japan and also author of the 1910 book 'The ABC of go', which provides a detailed and comprehensive description of the Japanese board game. It was reported in October 2001 that Miss de Havilland was among 40 prominent French residents who were victims of hoax anthrax attacks. (The attacks were proven to be hoaxes after a woman was arrested in Paris for sending out envelopes containing a powdery substance.) She made a special appearance at the The 75th Annual Academy Awards (2003) (TV) and received a well-deserved standing ovation. In 1991, her son, Benjamin Briggs Goodrich, a statistical analyst, died of complications from Hodgkin's disease at his mother's home in Paris, France. She and Joan Fontaine are the first sisters to win Oscars and the first ones to be Oscar-nominated in the same year. She and Errol Flynn acted together in 9 movies: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Dodge City (1939), Four's a Crowd (1938), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) and They Died with Their Boots On (1941) Her mother named her Olivia after William Shakespeare's romantic heroine in "Twelfth Night.". Was somewhat overweight when she first came to Paramount, yet Edith Head was able to design costumes with a slimming effect. Ex-sister-in-law of Collier Young, Brian Aherne and William Dozier. When she was 9 years old, she made a will in which she stated, "I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister Joan [Joan Fontaine], since she has none". In the 1950s, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson, AZ, named one of their female javalinas "Olivia de Javalina" in her honor; incidentally, their male was named "Gregory Peckory" to honor actor Gregory Peck. Was a close friend of Ronald Reagan during their time in Hollywood. Both were active anti-communist members of the Hollywood Democratic Committee. In Italy, almost all of her films were dubbed by either Dhia Cristiani or Lidia Simoneschi. For the Italian releases of two of her most celebrated and fondly remembered roles, Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), she was dubbed, respectively, by Renata Marini and Dina Perbellini. This was the only time that either Italian actresses lent her voice to Olivia. Attended as a surprise guest honoring the late Bette Davis, her long-time friend and co-star at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles on May 1, 2008. The event, "A Centennial Tribute to Bette Davis", was hosted by film historian Robert Osborne and its reception included Davis's son, Michael Merrill, Davis's long-time personal assistant Kathryn Sermak and friends Gena Rowlands & Joan Leslie. Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is at 6764 Hollywood Blvd. Received the Medal of Arts Honor from President George W. Bush at a White House ceremony in the East Room on November 17, 2008, "for her persuasive and compelling skill as an actress in roles from Shakespeare's Hermia to Margaret Mitchell's Melanie. Her independence, integrity, and grace won creative freedom for herself and her fellow film actors.". Was offered the role of Mary Hatch Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) after Jean Arthur turned it down, but she also turned down the part. Donna Reed was cast instead and it went on to be one of her most famous performances.