First Name
Olivia
Birthday
1916-07-01
Height
64
Build
Slim
Eye Color
Brown - Dark
Hair Color
Brown - Dark
Birthplace
Tokyo, Japan
Zodiac Sign
Cancer
Ethnicity
White
Religion
Anglican / Episcopalian
Claim to Fame
Gone With the Wind
Nationality
British
Gender
Female
Film Role
Actor/Actress, Soundtrack
Has Detailed Data (New)
1
Profile Bio Text
Daughter of actress Lillian Fontaine and older sister of actress Joan Fontaine. Once engaged to James Stewart during the early 1940`s. She starred in a total of nine movies with Errol Flynn. Was very close friends with Ronald Reagan, and Bette Davis.
Olivia de Havilland is the last surviving principal cast member from Gone With the Wind. She played Melanie, the sweet southern belle with a backbone of steel, and de Havilland is reportedly very much like the character she portrayed. De Havilland won two Oscars, for To Each His Own, a 1946 drama in which her character became pregnant out of wedlock, and three years later as The Heiress, in which Montgomery Clift might be pursuing her only for her money. She was also nominated for Hold Back the Dawn, in which Romanian Charles Boyer might be pursuing her to marry his way to US citizenship, for The Snake Pit, where her character was committed to an insane asylum, as well as for Gone With the Wind.
De Havilland got two big breaks in one summer production of A Midsummer Night`s Dream. First, she understudied for Gloria Stuart`s character, Hermia, and in true Hollywood fashion got the role when Stuart had to drop out. Then Warner Brothers decided to film the stage production as a feature, and De Havilland signed a seven year contract with the studio.
Warner Bros. typecast de Havilland as a sweet, innocent damsel in distress, and that became her enduring screen persona. She proved perfect rescue fodder for Errol Flynn, and they made eight films together, including the classics The Adventures of Robin Hood (she was Flynn`s Maid Marian), Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and They Died with Their Boots On. De Havilland was reportedly infatuated with Flynn, and while she never confirmed an affair, she has said, "He was the one I enjoyed kissing most. When I was working with him, I could hardly wait to get to rehearsal".
Gone With the Wind was, of course, a wildly popular novel before it became the biggest movie of its time. While the film`s producers scoured the nation looking for an actress to play Scarlett O`Hara, de Havilland was one of the few `name` actresses at the time not pleading for the role. Instead she wanted to play Melanie, a supporting role, and she convinced Warner Brothers to "loan her out" to a rival studio for the production. There were problems on the set, and the film went through several directors. One of them, George Cukor, was a gay man known as a "woman`s director" and Clark Gable felt that his character was getting short shrift, so Cukor was fired. Victor Fleming received the sole screen credit as director despite directing only about half of the film, but he simply loathed actresses, leaving de Havilland so fearful that she would sneak off to have Cukor help with her role.
When she returned to Warner Brothers after Gone With the Wind, de Havilland was dismayed that, despite her Oscar nomination, Warners wanted her to resume playing ingenue roles. She begged for more substantial parts, but the studio continued to cast her in light romantic comedies.
When de Havilland was "loaned out" again for the drama Hold Back the Dawn in 1941, she was again Oscar-nominated, but found herself competing with her sister, Joan Fontaine, who had been nominated for Alfred Hitchcock`s Suspicion. The two actresses had been fiercely competitive even as children, and Fontaine, who is one year younger, said that de Havilland never got over having to share their mother with another child. Reportedly Fontaine had not planned to attend the ceremony, until de Havilland persuaded her that she must. The sisters were then seated at the same table, and when Fontaine won the award she ignored de Havilland`s attempt to congratulate her. This fanned their sibling difficulties into a life-long feud.
Following Hold Back the Dawn, de Havilland returned to Warners again, but she began refusing the lightweight parts that the studio wanted her to play. In return, the studio repeatedly placed her on suspension. When her seven-year contract expired, the studio said that she still owed them time from her suspensions, and de Havilland sued. During the three years of the lawsuit, she was unable to work in film, and instead entertained soldiers in the US, the Aleutians, and in the South Pacific. The lawsuit was decided in de Havilland`s favor, breaking what is now called "The de Havilland Clause," and reducing the tight control that studios had over performers.
Triumphantly returning to the screen, de Havilland began to choose her own projects, and had a long string of successes. In 1946, when she won the Oscar for To Each His Own, the Academy arranged for her sister to present the award, and photographers famously caught the moment when de Havilland refused Fontaine`s congratulatory handshake. Some sources say the Fontaine-de Havilland feud was overplayed for the tabloids
Couple Profile Source
www.nndb.com/people/741/000022675/
High School
Los Gatos High School, Los Gatos, CA (1934)
University
Mills College
Full Name at Birth
Olivia Mary De Havilland
Father
Walter Augustus de Havilland (31 August 1872 – 23 May 1968)
Mother
Lillian Augusta Ruse Fontaine (11 June 1886 – 20 February 1975) (She was also an actress)
Sister
Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 16 December 2013)
Friend
Ronald Reagan, Bette Davis (one of her best friends), Gloria Stuart, Hattie McDaniel, Ida Lupino, Nancy Coleman
Biography (Print)
The Films of Olivia De Havilland [1986] (Tony Thomas), Olivia de Havilland (A Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies) [1976] (Judith M. Kass), Every Frenchman Has One [1961] (Olivia de Havilland), Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine [1984] (Charles Higham), The Women of Warner Brothers: The Lives and Careers of Fifteen Leading Ladies [2002] (Daniel Bubbeo)
Biographical Movie
Melanie Remembers: Reflections by Olivia de Havilland [2004]
Portrayed In
My Wicked, Wicked Ways... The Legend of Errol Flynn [1985]
Age
102
Friend
Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Billy Wilder
Wikipedia Text
Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland DBE (born July 1, 1916) is a British-American actress, whose career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films, and was one of the leading movie stars during the golden age of Classical Hollywood. She is best known for her early screen performances in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and her later award-winning performances in To Each His Own (1946), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Heiress (1949).
Occupation Text
Actress
Dating Preference
White Guys
Year(s) Active
1935–2009
Weight
107
Official Websites
www.oliviadehavilland.net/, www.nndb.com/people/741/000022675/
Bust (inches)
34
Dating Status
Single
Pregnant
2
Wiki Bio Text
==Olivia de Havilland==
Actress - ===Born=== July 1, 1916 in Tokyo, Japan
===Birth Name=== Olivia Mary de Havilland
===Nickname=== Livvie
===Height=== 5' 4" (1.63 m)
===Mini Bio (1)=== Olivia Mary de Havilland was born July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan, to British parents Lilian Augusta (Ruse), a former actress, and Walter Augustus de Havilland, an English professor and patent attorney. Her sister, Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her surname comes from her paternal grandfather, whose family was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old, and she moved with her mother and sister to Saratoga, 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 (1935), Alibi Ike (1935) and Captain Blood (1935), 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 (1939). Playing the sweet Melanie Hamilton, Olivia received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, only to lose 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 Hold Back the Dawn (1941), which resulted in her second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. Again she lost, this time to her sister Joan for her role in Suspicion (1941). 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. As if that weren't bad enough, when her contract with Warners was up, she was told that she would have to make up the time lost because of the suspension. Irate, she sued the studio, and for the length of the court battle she didn't appear in a single film. The result, however, was worth it. In a landmark decision, the court said not only that Olivia did not have to make up the time, but that all performers were to be limited to a seven-year contract that would include any suspensions handed down. This became known as the "de Havilland decision"; no longer could studios treat their performers as mere cattle. Returning to screen in 1946, Olivia made up for lost time by appearing in four films, one of which finally won her the Oscar that had so long eluded her. It was To Each His Own (1946), 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 (1948) 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 (1948). As in the two previous years, she made only one film in 1949, but she again won a nomination and the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Heiress (1949). After a three-year hiatus, Olivia returned to star in My Cousin Rachel (1952). From that point on, she made few appearances on the screen but was seen on Broadway and in some television shows. Her last screen appearance was in The Fifth Musketeer (1979), and her last career appearance was in the TV movie The Woman He Loved (1988). During the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of GWTW in 1989, she graciously declined requests for all interviews as the only surviving one of the four main stars. Today she enjoys a quiet retirement in Paris, France.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Denny Jackson
===Spouse (2)===
[[Pierre Galante]] (2 April 1955 - 30 April 1979) (divorced) (1 child)
[[Marcus Goodrich]] (26 August 1946 - 28 August 1953) (divorced) (1 child)
===Trade Mark (2)=== 1. Emotionally (and sometimes physically) vulnerable characters. 2. Despite her great beauty, was often cast as plain, everyday women
===Trivia (66)===
==Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland== DBE (/dəˈhævɪlənd/; born July 1, 1916) is a retired British-American actress, whose career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films, and was one of the leading movie stars during the golden age of Classical Hollywood. She is best known for her early screen performances in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and her later award-winning performances in To Each His Own (1946), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Heiress (1949).
Middle Name
Mary
Maiden Name
De Havilland
Couple Profile Source
www.imdb.com/name/nm0000014/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
Official Websites
www.allmovie.com/artist/olivia-de-havilland-p17765, www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/olivia_de_havilland/
Couple Profile Source
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_de_Havilland
Year(s) Active
1935–1988
Favorite Foods
Corn on the Cob
Favorite Colors
Blue
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