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Olivia de Havilland, the Oscar-winning star of such films as “Gone With The Wind” and “The Snake Pit,” who never lost touch with her childhood home in Saratoga, died of natural causes Sunday at her home in Paris.
She was 104.
Twice, Ms. de Havilland won the Academy Award for best leading actress — for “To Each His Own” in 1946 and “The Heiress” in 1949 — and twice she was nominated for performances critics thought were better.
As Melanie in “Gone With the Wind,” she won the hearts of a nation, but she didn’t win the prize. In “The Snake Pit” she didn’t win either, but her performance prompted critics to call it the first honest film about mental illness.
When Hollywood discovered Ms. de Havilland in 1934, movie critics went straight to the word “ingenue.”
They saw her as innocent and inexperienced at 18, but in San Jose she was already a headline word. “Livvy” was no stranger in the Santa Clara Valley.
“This Alice is exquisite of face, dainty, trembling on the verge of young womanhood,” said one local critic of her Saratoga performance in “Alice in Wonderland.” “She has intelligence, the ability to impersonate, a sense of rhythm in reading lines, the power to project a character and build it up until she and it are one.”
Olivia de Havilland — born in Tokyo in 1916 — and her sister, Joan Fontaine, had come as toddlers to San Francisco, then San Jose and finally Saratoga after World War I.
The Fontaines’ two-story Tudor Revival home on La Paloma Avenue in Saratoga where Olivia and Joan grew up still stands, Annette Stansky, president of the Saratoga Historical Foundation board, said Sunday. It was designed in 1923 by Andrew. P. Hill Jr., the son of the renowned San Jose photographer and California landscape painter who has a South Bay high school named after him.
Although the daughters moved away by the mid-1930s to make movies, Lilian Fontaine kept the residence until 1959, according to the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
At Los Gatos High, Ms. de Havilland debated for her school, wrote for its newspaper and yearbook, played on the field hockey team, and acted in drama club performances.
“It says something about the schools and opportunity that existed at that time,” Stansky said. “Olivia got one of her first breaks here in Saratoga when she was in a local play.”
In her senior year, she roomed at the Saratoga Inn and at school earned a scholarship to Mills College in Oakland.
She never made it to Mills. Under the tutelage of Dorothea Johnston, who operated the Theater of the Glade behind the Saratoga Inn, Ms. de Havilland showed she had more than a little theater potential.
Producer Max Reinhardt heard her read and signed her to be Hermia in the 1934 Hollywood Bowl production of the Shakespeare fantasy, then for the 1935 film version produced at Warner Bros. She shared billing with James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Dick Powell and Joe E. Brown, and when she then signed a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., she was on her way to reluctant stardom.
Her predominant leading man was Errol Flynn, and she admitted having a crush on the 25-year-old swashbuckler when she was still 18. She made eight movies with him, including “Captain Blood,” “Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Charge of the Light Brigade,” but no romance ever blossomed, she told former Mercury News columnist Marjorie Pierce. Despite Flynn’s later womanizing reputation, Ms. de Havilland professed to having seen only “a sort of Irish country-gentleman side” of him. For the most part in her films with Flynn, she was the ingenue, given second billing but no roles to challenge her acting ability.
On loan from Warner, Ms. de Havilland won her first demanding role, Melanie, in David O. Selznick’s “Gone With the Wind.” The film, once lauded as one of the greatest ever made, has since come to be seen as a glamorized portrayal of the antebellum South that ignored the realities of slavery.
Critics praised her portrayal of a complicated relationship with Vivian Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara, and she earned her first Academy Award nomination, for supporting actress. Motion Picture Academy voters chose her co-star, Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Academy Award.
Ms. de Havilland lost to her sister two years later, when Fontaine won the best-actress Oscar for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion.” Olivia had played in a William Wilder melodrama, “Hold Back the Dawn,” and was a nominee with Barbara Stanwyck, Greer Garson and Bette Davis.
Gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons had turned the contest between the sisters into a sibling rivalry. Fontaine, who had been nominated in 1940 for “Rebecca,” reportedly tried to keep her distance. Ms. de Havilland reportedly tried to deflect any tension, telling Parsons, “I voted for her in ‘Rebecca,’ and I’ll probably vote for her again this year.”
When Parsons pursued the rift, Ms. de Havilland said, “Of course we fight. What two sisters don’t?”
The feud lost its gossip for the next five years as Ms. de Havilland waged a one-woman war for fewer but better roles — she had acted in four movies in 1939. She refused parts Warner Bros. assigned to her and found herself on suspension. She sued the studio and won a precedent-setting case in 1944. It established that the maximum length of a contract was seven years and that the studio could not add to the length of an actor’s contract the amount of time that the actor spent under suspension.
Her battles with the star system essentially kept Ms. de Havilland from the screen for three years during World War II — she spent some of that time entertaining military service men and women for the USO, United Service Organizations, on the mainland and in the South Pacific — but her return propelled her into a productive period of critical acclaim.
Ms. de Havilland earned her first Academy Award as a leading actress in 1946. In “To Each His Own,” she played an unwed mother who gave up her child, then spent 25 years in self-denial.
1948 and 1949 were exceptional years for Ms. de Havilland. The New York Film Critics named her best actress both years, first for “The Snake Pit” and then for “The Heiress.” She was also nominated both years for the best-actress Oscar, winning for “Heiress.” She made the cover of Time magazine in 1948.
“The Snake Pit” was one of Hollywood’s first attempts to examine mental illness in the movies, and a half-century later Ms. de Havilland’s depiction of a depressed woman, mistreated in an institution, is still considered one of the most candid.
Ms. de Havilland wed writer Marcus Goodrich in 1946, but their marriage lasted only six years. Their only child, Benjamin, died at age 42 after suffering from Hodgkin’s disease for 23 years.
In the 1950s, major films continued to come Ms. de Havilland’s way — she appeared in “My Cousin Rachel” in 1952 and “Not as a Stranger” in 1955 but also in the “B” variety. She married Pierre Galante, a Paris Match editor, and moved to Paris. Her second child, Gisele, became a lawyer and an editor. She and Galante divorced in 1979, but continued to live as neighbors.
After the late ’70s, Ms. de Havilland’s trips “home” became less frequent, although she was interviewed when she appeared in the movie “Airport ’77” and the television sequel to “Roots.”
At the Academy Awards in 2003, Ms. de Havilland introduced a stage full of previous Oscar winners. In 2008, de Havilland received a National Medal of Arts and was awarded France’s Legion of Honor two years later.
In 2009, she narrated a documentary about Alzheimer’s disease, “I Remember Better When I Paint.” Catherine Zeta-Jones played de Havilland in the 2017 FX miniseries “Feud,” about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but de Havilland objected to being portrayed as a gossip and sued FX. The case was dismissed.
She is survived by her daughter, Gisele Galante Chulack, her son-in-law Andrew Chulack and her niece Deborah Dozier Potter.
Her publicist said funeral arrangements are private and that memorial contributions should go to the American Cathedral in Paris.
The Associated Press and staff writer Elliott Almond contributed to this report.
