The Full Biography
Olivia de Havilland. Actress. Two-time Academy Award winner. The woman who took Warner Bros. to court.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is Melanie Hamilton Wilkes on a ruined staircase, a gentle face in a burning country. The year was 1939. The picture was Gone with the Wind. Audiences loved her for the kindness. What the still cannot show is that the woman playing Melanie had already spent four years as a studio’s decorative girl, and that she was about to spend the next four fighting the men who owned her contract.
She was born Olivia Mary de Havilland on July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, to British parents. Her father, Walter, taught at a Japanese college and later practiced patent law. Her mother, Lilian, had wanted the stage. A younger sister, Joan, arrived the next year. The marriage did not hold. Lilian took the girls to California and raised them in Saratoga, in the hills above the Santa Clara Valley. The sisters were close, then competitive, then something harder. That story would follow them into every dressing room in town.
Olivia was meant for college. Mills, in Oakland. Then Max Reinhardt staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934 and needed a Hermia. She was eighteen. Warner Bros. put the production on film the next year. The door was not a lobby in Monte Carlo. It was a studio contract, seven years, and a boss named Jack Warner who liked her face and did not care what else she could do.
Errol Flynn arrived in 1935, in Captain Blood. She was the governor’s daughter. He was the pirate. They made eight pictures together. The Charge of the Light Brigade. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), in which she is Maid Marian and the Technicolor still looks wet. The public decided they were a pair. On the lot they were colleagues who happened to photograph as destiny. Warner kept her in the same dress: the good girl, the prize, the smile at the end of the swordfight.
David O. Selznick wanted her for Melanie. Jack Warner did not want to loan her. She went around him — including, the record says, to Warner’s wife — and got the part. Vivien Leigh was Scarlett. Clark Gable was Rhett. Olivia played the woman who refuses to become cruel. She was nominated for Supporting Actress. Hattie McDaniel won, and deserved to. De Havilland did not treat the loss as a wound. She treated Melanie as a standard. For the rest of a very long life, people would stop her in shops and thank her for that decency, as if she had invented it.
At home, the sister story would not stay home. Joan had taken their mother’s married name, Fontaine, and gone to work. In 1942 Joan won Best Actress for Hitchcock’s Suspicion. Olivia was nominated the same night, for Hold Back the Dawn. The industry made a meal of it. The rift was real. It was also more ordinary than the columns allowed: two gifted women, one household, not enough air. They remain the only siblings to win lead acting Oscars. They did not become a double act.
What Warner would not give her was the work. She refused parts she judged beneath the audience and beneath her. The studio suspended her, then added the suspended months back onto the seven-year term, as if a calendar were a rubber band. On August 23, 1943, on the advice of the lawyer Martin Gang, she sued Warner Bros. in Los Angeles. She asked a court to say that seven years meant seven years from the first day of work, not seven years of actual shooting after every punishment.
I couldn’t bear to disappoint my fans by doing indifferent work in an indifferent film.Olivia de Havilland, 2010
In 1944 the California Court of Appeal agreed. The ruling, built on Labor Code section 2855, is still called the De Havilland Law. It capped entertainment contracts at seven calendar years. It is why a studio cannot own a performer forever by stopping the clock. She paid for the victory. Warner’s friends did not hire her. She was off the screen while the war ended and the town waited to see if the girl had been ruined.
She had not been ruined. She had been freed.
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers Melanie, not a civil complaint. To Each His Own (1946) gave her an unwed mother and her first Academy Award for Best Actress. The Snake Pit (1948) put her in a state hospital and asked the audience to look at mental illness without the old jokes. The Heiress (1949), for William Wyler, opposite Montgomery Clift, is the performance that lasts after the gowns are forgotten. Catherine Sloper learns what she is worth. The last walk up the stairs, the lamp in her hand, the door she will not open — that is not Melanie. That is a woman who has read the contract.
The Academy Award for The Heiress came in 1950. Two Best Actress statues. The ingenue was over.
The Flynn pictures after Robin Hood are the rest of the costume the studio would not let her take off. Dodge City (1939). The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), as Lady Penelope, with Bette Davis on the throne. Santa Fe Trail (1940). They Died with Their Boots On (1941), the last of the eight with Flynn, a Custer picture in which she is again the prize at the end of a charge. Hold Back the Dawn (1941), on loan to Paramount for Mitchell Leisen, opposite Charles Boyer, is the first real crack in the ingenue: a schoolteacher, a scheme, a nomination. In This Our Life (1942), for John Huston, gave her the decent sister opposite Bette Davis’s destroyer. Princess O’Rourke (1943) was the kind of assignment she was learning to refuse.
After the court and the two Oscars she did not become a monument on a shelf. The Dark Mirror (1946) split her into twins. My Cousin Rachel (1952), opposite Richard Burton, is a widow the audience is not supposed to trust. Not as a Stranger (1955). The Ambassador’s Daughter (1956). The Proud Rebel (1958), with Alan Ladd and a boy and a dog, a Western she played without the old Warner smile. Libel (1959). Light in the Piazza (1962), as a mother in Italy protecting a daughter the plot will not leave alone. The ingenue was over. The woman who had read the contract kept taking parts that required a mind.
Six things most people never knew
- She was born in Tokyo. The Golden Age face that looks purely Californian began in Japan, to a British teacher and a mother who had wanted the stage.
- Warner Bros. tried to stretch seven years by stopping the clock. Every suspension was added back. She took them to court so a year would mean a year.
- The De Havilland Law is still the law. California still uses that 1944 reading of the seven-year rule. A generation of actors worked under a freedom she bought with two lost years.
- She and Joan Fontaine are the only siblings with lead Oscars. The feud was not a publicist’s invention. It was a family with one spotlight.
- She wrote a funny book about France. Every Frenchman Has One (1962) is not a memoir of Melanie. It is a woman in Paris, learning the rules, refusing to be solemn about it.
- At 101 she was made a Dame — and filed another lawsuit. Queen Elizabeth II named her Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2017. The same year she sued FX over Feud. She lost on appeal. She was still, at a hundred, unwilling to be used without her leave.
She married the novelist Marcus Goodrich in 1946. Their son, Benjamin, was born in 1949. The marriage ended in 1953. In 1955 she married Pierre Galante, an editor at Paris Match. Their daughter, Gisèle, was born in 1956. Paris was not a retirement. It was a life. She took an apartment near the Bois de Boulogne and learned to be a neighbor instead of a possession. She and Galante divorced in 1979 and remained, against the usual script, attached. He died in 1998.
The later years
She did not vanish. She chose. Lady in a Cage (1964) is a cruel little thriller she had no business making if she only wanted to be loved. Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), opposite Bette Davis, after Joan Crawford left the picture, showed the steel under the famous gentleness. Television came: Roots: The Next Generations (1979); Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986), which brought a Golden Globe. The Woman He Loved (1988) was her last screen work. She was seventy-two. She had nothing left to prove to a camera.
Benjamin died in 1991, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, at forty-one. She had already outlived the studio that tried to own her. Outliving a child is a different kind of year. She did not perform the grief. She stayed in Paris. Gisèle was there. The apartment, the garden, the letters, the rare interview in which the voice is still exact and the memory is still filed.
Honors arrived as if the town had remembered its manners. The National Medal of Arts, from President George W. Bush, at the White House in November 2008. The Légion d’honneur, in ranks. In June 2017, two weeks before she turned one hundred and one, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She received the insignia in Paris. She did not fly to London to curtsy for the cameras. She had stopped doing indifferent work in indifferent rooms.
The 1970s disaster pictures paid Paris rent and asked nothing of Melanie. Airport ’77 put her on a sunken jet. The Swarm (1978) put her in a bee picture she did not need. The Fifth Musketeer (1979) was costume again, without Flynn. She took them, cash and all, and went home to the 16th arrondissement. The house near the Bois de Boulogne, a three-storey place she had shared with Galante, became the parish: garden, letters, a neighbor’s manners. She and Galante had divorced in 1979 and remained attached. He died in 1998. She did not make a tour of either fact.
On July 1, 2016, she turned one hundred. Tributes arrived from people who had seen Melanie at sixteen and from actors who work under the seven-year rule she bought. She did not fly to a stage. She stayed in Paris, walked when she could, read, and answered some of the letters. Tourists who wrote her at ninety still wrote her at a hundred and four. Neighbors knew a precise old Englishwoman, not a monument. I Remember Better When I Paint (2009) used her voice in a documentary about art and memory, a small last credit, not a comeback. She had stopped owing the camera a face.
In 2017 she also sued FX Networks and Ryan Murphy over Feud: Bette and Joan, which had used her as a narrator she did not play and a gossip she did not consent to be. A trial court let the case proceed. The California Court of Appeal reversed. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear her. The law she had made in 1944 was about contracts. This case was about whether a living person may be turned into a device. She lost. She had still, at 101, refused to sit still for the device.
She was, by then, the last surviving principal credited adult of Gone with the Wind. Tourists who had seen Melanie at sixteen wrote her letters at ninety. She answered some of them. She walked. She read. Neighbors knew a precise old Englishwoman, not a monument. She died in Paris on July 26, 2020. She was one hundred and four. The funeral was private. Hollywood, for once, was not invited to the house.
After she was gone
Gisèle remains. The De Havilland Law remains. The Heiress still teaches a young actress what a closed door can mean. Robin Hood still plays on Sunday afternoons, and a certain kind of viewer still falls in love with Maid Marian without knowing that the woman in green was already planning her deposition. The sister story gets retold because it is easy. The contract story is the one that changed other people’s paychecks.
She did not have the loudest career in pictures. She had one of the most consequential.
She came out of Tokyo and Saratoga, wore Warner’s gowns, made Melanie the moral weather of a national film, then spent two dark years so that seven years would mean seven years. After that she lived as a Parisian longer than she had lived as a contract player. The still on the staircase will last. It should. The life behind it was longer, harder, and more useful to every actor who came after than the still can say.
If you only remember Melanie, you have the photograph. If you remember the lawsuit, and the apartment near the Bois, and the Dame at 101 who would not be used, you have her.
Portrait: Warner Bros. · Public domain (PD-US, Warner Bros. 1940 publicity still) · via Wikimedia Commons