She died in Paris at the age of 104 the actress Olivia De Havilland, last survivor of the cast of “Gone With the Wind”: in the blockbuster he had played the part of Melania, female co-protagonist of the story together with Rossella O’Hara, played by Vivien Leigh. This is the portrait of Paolo Mereghetti, film critic of the Corriere della Sera.
It has always been for everyone Melania, the submissive and modest wife of the mild Ashley of “Gone with the Wind” (1939), so naive that she did not notice that her cousin Rossella was threatening her husband. But the career of the longest-lived star, who disappeared at 104 in Paris, where she moved in the mid-fifties to get away from a Hollywood that did not love her much, is much richer and more complex, both for the films she has interpreted that for the trial he filed against Warner Bros..
Born on July 1, 1916 in Tokyo, where her father, an English lawyer, practiced, Olivia de Havilland followed her mother Lilian Ruse to Los Angeles where she had moved after the divorce together with her younger daughter Joan, who will choose the surname of the woman’s second husband to make her film debut, George Fontaine.
Olivia got her first professional acting experience thanks to Max Reinhardt who entrusted her with the part of Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” staged in 1934 at the Hollywood Bowl, a role that will also be hers in film production the following year, produced by Warner who puts it under contract.
The iron rules of the Hays code, which came into force recently, push Warner to focus on adventure films, relegating women to supporting roles. Thus de Havilland, which could count on a reassuring, elegant and sweet beauty, became the ideal partner for Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood” (1935), “The charge of the 600” (1936) and “The legend of Robin Hood” (1938), conquering above all the female audiences who see in her the woman they wanted to be, charming without being sexy tender and submissive and yet ready to fight to defend her man.
But the actress, who at 19 she received as a gift from Joan Crawford a book on Stanislavsky that has devoured, believes she is ready for more complex roles and begins to endure badly the limits that the studio imposes on her, as when she would not want to cross the filming of “Gone With the Wind” – Selznick had to negotiate a lot with Jack Warner to entrust her with the role of Melania – with those of “The Earl of Essex” where Michael Curtiz still wants her alongside Flynn.
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The rules of the studio, however, are strict and the actress must reluctantly bend over a very tiring double job and give up, again for Jack Warner’s hostility, to interpret the next film produced by Selznick, that “Rebecca the first wife of Hitchcock” which will end up being entrusted to her sister Joan Fontaine, with which he begins to have increasingly tense relationships (definitively disappeared on the occasion of the death of the mother for how to organize the funeral: since 1975 the two sisters have no longer spoken or seen each other).
Obliged by contract to play roles that do not offer her to grow artistically – “The story of General Custer” (always with Errol Flynn who courts her unsuccessfully), “Strawberry blonde” (where she struggles with Rita Hayworth’s eroticism) – de Havilland, who in the meantime has become an American citizen, got her own in ’41 second nomination after the one for Melania, once again with a non-Warner film: she was loaned to Paramount for the role of the naive teacher who makes Charles Boyer fall in love in “The Golden Door”.
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To the production problems, which often cost her suspension from work, there are also disagreements with colleagues, as with Bette Davis, jealous that during the filming of “In our life” Olivia lived a fiery relationship with the director John Huston. In 1943 her contract finally ends but Warner would like to recover 25 weeks of additional work to compensate for the suspension periods imposed to punish her for her refusals and Olivia de Havilland decides to bring the study to court. A cause that many advise against (even Davis had been humiliated by Warner in court) but which she ultimately wins, definitively changing the rules of Hollywood and allowing for example the actors called to war not to have to recover the periods spent in the arms.
The fight in court cost her two years away from the sets, but now she is free to return and decide on her career. And the results will not be long in coming. With «To each his own destiny» (1946) wins his own first Oscar in the role of a mother girl who has to wait twenty years before finding him, a role that forces her to age twenty-five and play the same woman in four different ages, coming to use four different perfumes to better enter into the changes of her character. An acting refinement that the actress also demonstrates by measuring herself with genres she had never faced, the noir with “The dark mirror” (1946) where she gives birth to two twins with the opposite character, and the asylum drama with “The pit of the snakes” (1948), the first Hollywood film on the theme not only of madness but of his care and inhumanity of the health personnel, which earned her another nomination and the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival (also helping to change psychiatry legislation in 26 American states).
And finally his according to Oscar with “L’ereditiera” (1949) where he brings to the screen the character created by Henry James, a woman who after the initial submission knows how to show off a tough and decisive character. Just as he had shown in real life.
There were also missteps in his career, like when refused Blanche’s role in “A Tram Called Desire”, pushed by her husband Marcus Goodrich, a writer whom she married in 1946 and from whom she divorced in 1953, when she chose to leave America for Paris, where in ’55 she married the journalist Pierre Galante (from whom she divorced in 1979), and where he settled until his death. Coming back from time to time to Hollywood to still play some films, such as “The proud rebel” (1958, alongside Alan Ladd) or “Light in the square” (1962, shot in Italy) or “A day of terror” (1964, where is at the mercy of a trio of three drugged thugs).
The last treble is next to Bette Davis, of whom she had become a dear friend, for «Piano … piano, dolce Carlotta» (1965). Then only a few luxury appearances («Airport 77», «Swarm») before finally retiring to his Parisian home in the 16th arrondissement.
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July 26, 2020 (change July 26, 2020 | 6.45pm)
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