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Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1, 1916 in
Tokyo, Japan), is a film actor|actress.  

She is the daughter of British parents, patent
attorney Walter de Havilland and actress Lillian
Fontaine.  Her sister is the actress Joan Fontaine
(born 1917), from whom she is famously estranged.
De Havilland's family moved from Tokyo when she
was two years old, settling in Saratoga,
California. She attended school at Los Gatos High
School and the Notre Dame Convent in Belmont,
California. 

De Havilland's career began co-starring with Joe
E. Brown in Alibi Ike in 1935 in film|1935.  She
appeared as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
her first stage production, at the Hollywood Bowl.
The stage production was later turned into a 1935
movie with the same cast. De Havilland played
opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films
as Captain Blood  and The Charge of the Light
Brigade (both 1936 in film|1936), and as Maid
Marian to Flynn's Robin Hood in The Adventures of
Robin Hood (movie)|The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938 in film|1938).  She played Melanie Wilkes in
Gone With The Wind (1939 in film|1939) and
received an Academy Award for Best Supporting
Actress nomination for her performance. 

In 1941, Olivia became a naturalized citizen of
the United States. De Havilland and her sister
Fontaine were each nominated for an Academy Award
for Best Actress in 1942 in film|1942.   Fontaine
won for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion
(1941 in film|1941) over de Havilland's nomination
for Hold Back the Dawn (1941).  
Biographer Charles Higham has described the events
of the award ceremony, stating that as Fontaine
stepped forward to collect her award, she had
pointedly rejected de Havilland's attempts at
congratulating her and that de Havilland was both
offended and embarrassed by her behavior.   He
records that the sisters had an uneasy
relationship, and though each has refused to
comment, Higham has stated that this event was the
catalyst for what would become a lifelong feud.  
The sisters have remained estranged since this
time. 

Also by this time, De Havilland was becoming
increasingly frustrated by the roles being
assigned to her.   She felt that she had proven
herself to be capable of playing more than the
demure ingenues and damsels in distress that were
quickly typecasting her and began to reject
scripts that offered her this type of role.  The
law allowed for studios to suspend contract
players for rejecting a role and the period of
suspension to be added to the contract period.  In
theory this allowed a studio to maintain
indefinite control over an uncooperative
contractee.  Most accepted this situation, while a
few tried to change the system; Bette Davis had
mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against Warner
Brothers Studios in the 1930s.  De Havilland
mounted a lawsuit in the 1940s and was successful,
thereby reducing the power of the studios and
extending greater creative freedom to the
performers. The decision was one of the most
significant and far reaching legal rulings until
that time in Hollywood.  Her courage in mounting
such a challenge, and her subsequent victory, won
her the respect and admiration of her peers.

The quality and variety of her roles began to
improve. She won Best Actress Academy Awards for
To Each His Own (movie)|To Each His Own (1946 in
film|1946) and The Heiress (1949 in film|1949),
and was also widely praised for her Academy Award
nominated performance in The Snake Pit (1948 in
film|1948).  This was one of the earliest films to
attempt a realistic portrayal of mental illness,
and de Havilland was lauded for her willingness to
play a role that was completely devoid of glamour
and that confronted such controversial subject
matter. 

De Havilland appeared sporadically in films after
the 1950s and attributed this partly to the
growing permissiveness of Hollywood films of the
period.  She was reported to have declined the
role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named
Desire, citing the unsavoury nature of the some
elements of the script and saying there were
certain lines she could not allow herself to
speak. The role eventually went to her former Gone
With the Wind co-star Vivien Leigh. De Havilland
continued acting until the 1980s.

A resident of Paris since the 1950s, de Havilland
lives in retirement and makes appearances rarely.
She is reported to be working on an autobiography.
 One of her most recent public appearances was as
a presenter at the 75th Annual Academy Awards in
2003 in film|2003. In 2004, Turner Classic Movies
put together a retrospective piece called "Melanie
Remembers," in which de Havilland was interviewed
for the 65th anniversary of Gone With the
Winds original release. Nearly 90 years
old, de Havilland remembered every detail of her
casting (she was in a contract with Warner's and
at first they refused to let her play Melanie for
Selznick) as well as filming (Vivien Leigh could
go immediately from break to taping and fall into
her Scarlett O'Hara role, while she needed 20
minutes to focus to get back into Melanie). The
documentary lasted for a little under 40 minutes
and can be seen on the Gone With the Wind
four-disc special collector's edition.

==Trivia==
* De Havilland attended Los Gatos High School in
Los Gatos, California as a teenager. Subsequently,
an acting award at the school is named after her.
* De Havilland was good friends with frequent
co-star Bette Davis.
* Her father, Walter de Havilland, was the
half-brother of Charles de Havilland, who was the
father of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, the famous
aviation pioneer.
* Out of the four stars of Gone With the Wind (the
others being Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Leslie
Howard), she is the only one who is still alive.
Ironically, her character was the only of the four
who died in the film.
* The Netherlands|Dutch poet J.A. Deelder wrote an
epic poem about his childhood called Portret van
Olivia de Havilland ("Portrait of Olivia de
Havilland").

==Filmography==
*Alibi Ike (1935)
*The Irish in Us (1935)
*A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
*Captain Blood (film)|Captain Blood (1935)
*A Dream Comes True (1935) (short subject)
*Anthony Adverse (1936)
*The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)
*The Making of a Great Motion Picture (1936)
(short subject)
*Call It a Day (1937)
*It's Love I'm After (1937)
*The Great Garrick (1937)
*Gold Is Where You Find It (1938)
*The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
*Four's a Crowd (1938)
*Hard to Get (1938 movie)|Hard to Get (1938)
*A Day at Santa Anita (1939) (short subject)
*Wings of the Navy (1939)
*Dodge City (1939 movie)|Dodge City (1939)
*The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
*Gone with the Wind (1939)
*Raffles (1940)
*My Love Came Back (1940)
*Santa Fe Trail (1940)
*The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
*Hold Back the Dawn (1941)
*They Died with Their Boots On (1941)
*The Male Animal (1942)
*In This Our Life (1942)
*Show Business at War (1943) (short subject)
*Princess O'Rourke (1943)
*Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)
*Government Girl (1943)
*To Each His Own (movie)|To Each His Own (1946)
*Devotion (1946)
*The Well-Groomed Bride (1946)
*The Dark Mirror (1946)
*The Snake Pit (1948)
*The Heiress (1949)
*My Cousin Rachel (1952)
*That Lady (1955)
*Not as a Stranger (1955)
*The Ambassador's Daughter (1956)
*The Proud Rebel (1958)
*Libel (1959)
*Light in the Piazza (1962)
*Lady in a Cage (1964)
*Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
*The Adventurers (1970)
*Pope Joan (1972)
*Airport '77 (1977)
*The Swarm (1978)
*The Fifth Musketeer (1979)

==TV Work==
*Noon Wine (1966)
*The Screaming Woman (1972)
*Roots: The Next Generations (1979) (miniseries)
*Murder Is Easy (1982)
*The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982)
*North and South II (1986) (miniseries)
*Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986)
*The Woman He Loved (1988)


==External link==
*imdb name | id=0000014 | name=Olivia de Havilland
*http://www.geocities.com/chillygirl_18/ Sheila's
Olivia de Havilland Site