Olivia de Havilland was the last great living female star of the movies’ golden age, in the 1930s and ’40s. She died today at 104 at her home in Paris, and her radiant visage and sinuous voice will haunt audiences for at least another century, whether as Errol Flynn’s blushing Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood, or as her old friend Bette Davis’s scheming foil in the Grand Guignol of Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
Yet de Havilland’s most lasting impact on Hollywood history is lodged not on celluloid but in the less glamorous pages of California’s law books, the result of her risky 1943 decision to sue her bosses at Warner Bros. Pictures. That move destroyed the indentured servitude that was the studio system, and helped pave the way for the modern age of movie stars as independent mini-moguls, with control of their own artistic and financial fortunes.
To be sure, de Havilland was plenty glamorous. She won two Academy Awards for Best Actress. She had passionate public romances with James Stewart, Howard Hughes, and John Huston, and survived a seriocomic courtship by a young John F. Kennedy. She maintained the most epic sororal feud in Hollywood history with her sister, Joan Fontaine. Yet her fearless, feminist stance in a Los Angeles County courtroom in the middle of World War II is her enduring legacy.
When de Havilland signed her first standard seven-year contract, with Warner Bros. in 1936, she was still a minor and it had to be approved by the courts. Born in Tokyo to British parents, she had grown up mostly in Northern California and was discovered by the Austrian director Max Reinhardt, who cast her in his 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As she blossomed from a promising young player into a star—in a string of swashbuckling costume dramas with Flynn, and then as the indelible Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind—de Havilland grew pickier about the parts she would accept.
Each time she turned one down, the studio’s imperious production chief, Jack L. Warner (whom she dubbed “Jack the Warden”), would suspend her without pay and tack the suspension time onto her existing contract. Warner had exacted similar penance from such talented but quarrelsome stars as Bette Davis and James Cagney, who turned down assembly-line roles that they felt were beneath them. But it was de Havilland who finally decided to do something about it.