Olivia de Havilland (1916 - 2020)

Dame Olivia de Havilland has died in her sleep at age 104.

Her first of 5 Oscar nominations was for Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind (1939).

She won Best Actress twice, for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949).

The New York Times obituary says:

Those roles came to her in no small part because of the resolve she showed when she stood up to the studios and won a battle that helped push Hollywood into the modern era, surprising the movie moguls, who may not have expected such steel in an actress so softly attractive and, at 5-foot-3, so unintimidatingly petite.…

After her success in “Gone With the Wind,” Ms. de Havilland returned to [Warner Bros.] with the expectation of more challenging roles. For the most part, they did not materialize.… 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.

She and her younger sister, Joan Fontaine (born Joan de Havilland), who died at 96 in 2013, are the only pair of siblings who've both won Oscars for Best Actress or Actor.

Both sisters will be strongly represented when I post "my favorite movies from each year of the past 100 years" (probably next year).

Here's a long video interview with Olivia de Havilland (2 and a half hours).

In that interview, she talks about the first time she met Errol Flynn, on the set of the first of 12 movies they were in together:

He said to me: "What do you want out of life?" And I thought: What an extraordinary question to be asked! Nobody's asked me that ever! …

And I said: "I would like respect for difficult work, well done."

And I said: "Well, what would you want out of life?" And he said: "I want success." And what he meant by that was fame and riches, both of which he certainly did achieve. But when he said it, I thought: Well, that's not enough. And indeed, it proved in Errol's life not to be enough. [He had substance abuse problems and died at age 50.]

She talks about why she soon tired of the roles she was initially given by Warner Brothers:

The life of the love interest is really pretty boring. The objective is the marriage bit — that's what the heroine is there for.… It was all about: will they get together in the end, that way? But the route to the marriage bit — and that was promised at the end, of course — was a pretty boring route. The heroine really — heroine?! She really had nothing much to do, except encourage the hero.… So I longed to play a character who initiated things, who experienced important things, … who interpreted the great agonies and joys of human experience.

(Publicity photos from Wikimedia Commons.)