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Gone with the Wind Star Olivia de Havilland on Turning 100 – and How Jared Leto ‘Enchanted’ Her

Legendary actress Olivia de Havilland will be ringing in her 100th birthday on Friday, and she tells PEOPLE she’ll be celebrating the milestone event with dinner and drinks with “dear, dear” friends.

In next week’s issue of PEOPLE, the two-time Oscar winner opens up about her life, career and romances, saying she is “content with the role that life has given me – a centenarian!”

De Havilland has been a star for more than eight decades, renowned for eight on-screen romances with Errol Flynn and for her role as sweet Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind.

And now in a frank interview, the leading lady – whose delightful 1962 memoir Every Frenchman Has One has been reissued by Crown Archetype / Random House – says she’s “honored” to be called the last star of the Golden Age of Hollywood and reveals that heartthrob Jared Leto – whom she says left her “enchanted” – visited her Parisian home to pay pilgrimage.

 

Olivia de Havilland, photographed in Paris on June 25, 2016 Courtesy of Andrew Chulack

Long before anyone coined the phrase “gender equality,” de Havilland was a pioneer who took on and beat the studio system. She is, in fact, one of a very few who can claim having both a star on Hollywood Boulevard and a California law (Labor Code Section 2855) named for them.

After she challenged Warner Bros. over the terms of her contract, the 1944 de Havilland Decision, “made it clear that California law limits to seven years the time an employer can enforce a contract with an employee.”

In 2010, de Havilland began corresponding (she’s very much into email and hand-written notes) with Leto, whose attorneys were citing it as precedent to exit him from a recording contract.

“I was more than surprised to hear from Jared Leto,” she says: “I was enchanted! He came to my house to thank me for the de Havilland Decision, which he and his band, 30 Seconds to Mars, had utilized victoriously in a similar contractual dispute.

“It’s wonderful knowing that the Decision continues to be useful to artists and other professionals these many years later.”

Olivia de HavillandArchivio GBB / CONTRASTO / Redux

Born in Japan of English parentage, then naturalized and raised in California, de Havilland made her screen debut in 1935 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’s been slapped around by Bette Davis in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte and starred in Lady in a Cage with James Caan and opposite Montgomery Clift in The Heiress.

She discusses many aspects of her personal and professional life, her friends, fabled romances (they’re not whom you expect) and touches on a number of her film roles – including two surprising classics she turned down: It’s A Wonderful Life and A Streetcar Named Desire.

From left, Hattie McDaniel, Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind Everett

In the midst of her Hollywood career and a divorce, de Havilland uprooted to France.

Invited to attend the 1953 Cannes Film Festival where she would the first woman to ever to be named President of the festival jury 12 years later, she arrived in France for her very first-ever visit and in extremely short order met and “married the very first Frenchman I’d met in France,” had a daughter and bought the Paris home (“a little white house, as tall and narrow as a chimney”) where she has lived for more than 60 years.

Asked if there’s any advice she’d give to her younger self, she replies, “Take a long leave of absence from the Warner contract and go to Mills College, where the scholarship I had won in 1934 is still waiting for me!”

Addressed her troubled relationship with her sister, fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, de Havilland simply says it was at stoked by the media.

She told the Associated Press: “A feud implies continuing hostile conduct between two parties. I cannot think of a single instance wherein I initiated hostile behavior.”

She added, “But I can think of many occasions where my reaction to deliberately inconsiderate behavior was defensive.”

Of their dynamic as sisters, she noted, “On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in the later years, severed. … ‘Dragon Lady,’ as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.’ ”

Asked what she would say if her sister were alive for her birthday she responded, “Out of self-protection I would maintain my silence!”

Link/Video: http://www.people.com/article/olivia-de-havilland-100-birthday-plans

Olivia de Havilland: Hollywood grande dame to celebrate 100th birthday

By Lee Smith, CNN Updated 1036 GMT (1836 HKT) June 30, 2016

Photos: Olivia de Havilland at 100

 

Olivia de Havilland remains one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s glamorous heyday of the 1930s and ’40s. The star celebrates her 100th birthday on Friday, July 1. De Havilland, the personification of kind and genteel ladies in the movies, initially wanted to be a schoolteacher. But she began acting professionally at 18 and enjoyed a career that spanned from the mid-’30s to the late ’80s. Here, in an uncharacteristic pose, she relaxes at home with a cigarette and beer in the early 1940s.

(CNN) She was pretty and demure, and usually played sympathetic heroines with ladylike airs in a movie career that spanned three decades.

But off-screen she was a fighter, maneuvering for challenging roles and winning a tough legal battle against a major studio, a victory that still resonates in Hollywood 70 years later.

This Friday, Olivia de Havilland proves once again she’s no ordinary Hollywood survivor. The Oscar-winning actress is celebrating her 100th birthday as the last surviving female superstar from the golden era of movies. Her chief male competitor, Kirk Douglas, will join the centenarian club in December, but de Havilland made her screen debut more than 10 years before him.

She first became famous as a damsel in distress opposite Errol Flynn in swashbuckling epics such as “Captain Blood” (1935) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938).

Her most enduring role came in “Gone With the Wind” (1939), still Hollywood’s top moneymaking film when adjusted for inflation. Her sweet and gentle Melanie Wilkes seemed too good to be true, but she held her own against the fiery Scarlett O’Hara.

Sienna @datingseniormen

Olivia de Havilland (age 99): French women taught me tact, restraint, subtlety, ‘no’ to banality, discretion #aging 6:07 PM – 26 Jun 2016

 

De Havilland won two Academy Awards for best actress — for “To Each His Own” (1946) and “The Heiress” (1949) — after breaking free from what she considered the unworthy parts being offered to her at Warner Bros. She successfully sued the studio in 1943 after it tried to extend her seven-year contract. Under the old contract system, studios wielded enormous power over actors, forcing them to take roles and suspending them without pay if they refused.

De Havilland’s case helped shift the power from the big studios of that era to the mega-celebrities and powerful talent agencies of today, and it remains a cornerstone of entertainment law.

The Hollywood grande dame has lived in Paris for six decades and outlasted most of her contemporaries, including her younger sister, actress Joan Fontaine, with whom she had a notoriously testy relationship.

In an interview last year for a recent Vanity Fair profile, writer William Stadiem remarked of de Havilland: “Her face is unlined, her eyes sparkling, her fabled contralto soaring … her memory photographic. She could easily pass for someone decades younger.”

To see this classic movie star in action, you can tune in to Turner Classic Movies on Friday nights in July. TCM, a Time Warner company like CNN, has named de Havilland its star of the month.

Photos: Olivia de Havilland at 100

 

The actress was born Olivia Mary de Havilland on July 1, 1916, to British parents who were living in Tokyo. With Japanese nurses in attendance, she appears here with her father, patent attorney Walter Augustus de Havilland, and her mother, Lillian, circa 1917. Her parents’ marriage grew strained, and soon her mother left Japan and settled in Saratoga, California, to raise Olivia and her younger sister, Joan.

 

De Havilland caught the acting bug in school plays as a teenager. She made her film debut as Hermia in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935) after appearing in a successful production of the play at the Hollywood Bowl. Warner Bros. quickly signed the young actress to a film contract. De Havilland warmly recalled working with Mickey Rooney, left, who played Puck in the film.

The actress appeared in two other movies before “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was even released, but she shot to stardom in her fourth film, “Captain Blood” (1935), a swashbuckling adventure with Errol Flynn. The two became one of the great romantic screen teams of the 1930s and ’40s, starring in eight films altogether. The actress later admitted to having a crush on her handsome co-star, but she refused to succumb to his roguish charms.

De Havilland was Maid Marian to Flynn’s outlaw from Sherwood Forest in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), a rollicking film that was perhaps their most memorable together. By now, however, the actress was growing bored with decorative roles that required little acting ability. “They Died With Their Boots On” (1941), about George Custer, would be the last of the de Havilland-Flynn pairings.

Most actresses were dying to play Scarlett in the film of Margaret Mitchell’s best-seller, “Gone With the Wind,” but de Havilland, center, had her eyes on Melanie. The actress pushed for Warner Bros. to loan her out to producer David O. Selznick for his 1939 epic. She received the first of five Oscar nominations, losing to co-star Hattie McDaniel, left, as best supporting actress, while Vivien Leigh, as Scarlett, took home the best actress award. De Havilland recently told Vanity Fair that McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar, “was the best” and “it was wonderful that she should win.”

Back at Warner Bros. after “GWTW,” de Havilland had to play second fiddle to Bette Davis, left, in “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939). The two actresses would become good friends, and Davis hailed de Havilland’s court victory against Warner as a major win for actors. The studio tried unsuccessfully to extend de Havilland’s seven-year contract, but the courts ruled in her favor.

De Havilland’s contentious relationship with her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, right, no doubt wasn’t helped when the latter became an actress, too. Fontaine, who died at 96 in 2013, took home an Oscar first for “Rebecca,” beating out her older sister in 1941. Their sibling rivalry was one of Hollywood’s most famous feuds.

De Havilland was off the screen for nearly three years while she battled Warner Bros. After winning her court case, she was free to chart her own career and scored her first Academy Award in “To Each His Own” (1946), here with Bill Goodwin. The part required a greater range from her than earlier roles as she matured from a young unwed mother into a older career woman.

De Havilland almost always played sympathetic parts, but her dual roles as twins in the thriller “The Dark Mirror” (1946) proved to be an exception. Lew Ayres, center, was a psychiatrist trying to figure out which twin was a disturbed murderess.

The actress, far left, appears in the winners’ circle with Harold Russell, Cathy O’Donnell and Anne Baxter at the Academy Awards in 1947. De Havilland won for “To Each His Own,” while Russell picked up the best supporting actor Oscar and an honorary award for playing a disabled veteran in best picture winner “The Best Years of Our Lives,” featuring O’Donnell as his girlfriend. Baxter, right, was best supporting actress for “The Razor’s Edge.”

Hollywood began to tackle more serious subjects in the post-World War II era, and de Havilland’s role in “The Snake Pit” was a prime example. She played a young woman who is committed to a mental institution after spiraling into illness. The demanding role proved de Havilland had become one of Hollywood’s top dramatic actresses by the late ’40s.

Perhaps de Havilland’s finest hour on the screen came with her second Oscar-winning role, Catherine Sloper in “The Heiress” (1949), from a play based on Henry James’ novel “Washington Square.” Initially awkward and shy, her character turned the tables on her cold, unloving father (played by Ralph Richardson) and a fortune-hunting suitor (Montgomery Clift).

Richard Burton made his American screen debut with de Havilland in the film version of the Daphne du Maurier mystery “My Cousin Rachel” (1952). The actress was effective in an atypical and ambiguous role: Was she a sympathetic heroine or an unscrupulous killer?

The actress left Hollywood behind when she married Paris Match editor Pierre Galante in 1955. The two had a daughter, Gisele, and eventually divorced in 1979. De Havilland’s son from an earlier marriage, Benjamin Goodrich, died in 1991.

The star’s career began to wind down after the 1960s, but she occasionally returned to Hollywood, appearing in such all-star disaster flicks as “The Swarm” (1978), pictured here, and “Airport ’77” (1977). She also turned to television, receiving an Emmy nomination for one of her last appearances, “Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna” (1987).

De Havilland joined the parade of older stars who made guest appearances on the popular ABC TV series “The Love Boat.” Here, she appears with series star, Gavin MacLeod, right, and Joseph Cotten in a 1981 episode. The actress earlier had starred with Cotten in “Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964).

The two-time Oscar winner introduces other former acting winners at the Academy Awards in 2003. De Havilland is one of only 13 actresses who have won two or more best actress Oscars.

U.S. President George W. Bush presents de Havilland with the National Medal of Arts at the White House in November 2008. The star was recognized “for her lifetime achievements and contributions to American culture as an actress.”

Link: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/entertainment/cnnphotos-tbt-olivia-de-havilland-100th-birthday/index.html