Olivia de Havilland

Olivia Mary de Havilland, born July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan, and died July 26, 2020, at the age of 104, was a British and American actress whose career in film, theater, and television extended from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films and was widely regarded as one of the leading actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living Academy Award winner and the earliest surviving recipient of that honor. Her younger sister was actress Joan Fontaine, also an Academy Award winner; the two siblings are the only sisters to have each won a major acting Oscar, though their relationship was marked by a well-documented rivalry.

De Havilland's father, Walter de Havilland, worked as an English professor at Tokyo Imperial University before becoming a patent attorney, and her mother, Lilian Fontaine, had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and worked as a stage actress. Her paternal cousin was aircraft designer and de Havilland company founder Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. The family relocated from Tokyo to California in 1919, eventually settling in Saratoga, where de Havilland was raised. Her mother encouraged an appreciation of the arts from an early age, enrolling her in ballet lessons at four and piano lessons at five, and having her recite Shakespeare passages to develop her diction. De Havilland attended Los Gatos High School, where she participated in school plays and the drama club, and later attended Notre Dame Convent in Belmont with plans to become an English and speech teacher.

Her path toward a professional acting career began in 1933 with an amateur theater debut in a Saratoga Community Players production of Alice in Wonderland. The following year, Austrian director Max Reinhardt cast her as Hermia in his Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Night's Dream after she stepped in when both the lead actress and understudy departed the project one week before the premiere. Reinhardt subsequently cast her in the Warner Bros. film adaptation of the same play, and she signed a five-year contract with the studio on November 12, 1934, at a starting salary of $200 per week.

Her screen debut came in Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, and she rose to prominence through a series of adventure films opposite Errol Flynn, including Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). One of her most recognized film roles is Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939), which earned her the first of five Academy Award nominations, the only one in the Best Supporting Actress category. In the 1940s, she moved away from ingénue parts and received Best Actress nominations for Hold Back the Dawn (1941), To Each His Own (1946), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Heiress (1949), winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for both To Each His Own and The Heiress. Her film honors also included two New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress, the Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

De Havilland appeared on Broadway three times between 1951 and 1962. She played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in 1951, appeared in the play Candida in 1952, and performed in A Gift of Time in 1962. Her television work included the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations in 1979 and Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna in 1986, the latter earning her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Television Movie or Series.

From the 1950s onward, de Havilland made her home in Paris. Among the honors she received later in life were the National Medal of the Arts, induction into France's Légion d'honneur, and appointment as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, conferred when she was 101 years old.