Olivia de Havilland - Career

Career

De Havilland 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, her film debut. Although the stage cast was largely replaced with Warner Bros. contract players, she was hired to reprise her role as Hermia. After appearing with Joe E. Brown in Alibi Ike and James Cagney in The Irish in Us, she played opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films as Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and as Maid Marian to Flynn's Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Overall, she starred opposite Flynn in eight films.

Allegedly, Joan Fontaine, de Havilland's sister, was approached by George Cukor to audition for Gone with the Wind (1939). He had just directed her in No More Ladies. She was excited until she learned he wanted her for the part of Melanie and not Scarlett. She reportedly turned him down flatly by saying, “Why don’t you ask my sister!” Olivia de Havilland went on to play Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

In 1941, de Havilland became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

De Havilland was becoming increasingly frustrated by the roles assigned to her. She felt she had proven herself capable of playing more than the demure ingénues and damsels in distress that were quickly typecasting her, and began to reject scripts that offered her this type of role. When her Warner Bros. contract expired, the studio informed her that six months had been added to it for times she had been on suspension; the law then 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 Bros. in the 1930s. De Havilland mounted a lawsuit in the 1940s, supported by the Screen Actors Guild and was successful, thereby reducing the power of the studios and extending greater creative freedom to the performers. The California Court of Appeal's decision was one of the most significant and far-reaching legal rulings in Hollywood and the statute on which it is based is still known as the De Havilland Law. Her victory won her the respect and admiration of her peers, among them her own sister Joan Fontaine, who later commented, "Hollywood owes Olivia a great deal". The studio, however, vowed never to hire her again. The ruling interpreted the already existing California Labor Code Section 2855. That code section imposes a 7-year limit on contracts for service unless the employee agrees to an extension beyond that term.

Following the release of Devotion, a Hollywood biography of the Brontë sisters filmed in 1943 but withheld from release during the suspension and litigation, de Havilland signed a three picture deal with Paramount Pictures. The quality and variety of her roles began to improve. James Agee, in his review for The Dark Mirror (1946), noted the change, and stated that although she had always been "one of the prettiest women in movies", her recent performances had proven her acting ability. He commented that she did not possess "any remarkable talent, but her playing is thoughtful, quiet, detailed, and well sustained, and since it is founded, as some more talented playing is not, in an unusually healthful-seeming and likable temperament, it is an undivided pleasure to see." She won Best Actress Academy Awards for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), and was also widely praised for her Academy Award–nominated performance in The Snake Pit (1948). This was one of the earliest films to attempt a realistic portrayal of mental illness, an 'historically important Hollywood exposé of the grim conditions in state mental hospitals' and de Havilland was lauded for her willingness to play a role that was completely devoid of glamor and that confronted such controversial subject matter. She won the New York Film Critics Award for both The Snake Pit and The Heiress.

During this era, de Haviland was also notable as a staunch liberal, campaigning for Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In 1946, determined to protect liberalism from infiltration by communists, she provoked a highly-publicized row: concerned about reports of Stalinist atrocities, de Havilland removed pro-Communist material from speeches prepared for her by the Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, a group later identified as a communist front organization. De Havilland became concerned that the liberal membership of the Independent Citizens' Committee was being manipulated by a small group of communists in leadership positions and that their pro-Soviet statements were damaging the election chances of the Democrats in the 1946 mid-term elections. She organized a fight to regain control of the committee and, upon their failure she resigned, triggering a wave of resignations from other Hollywood figures, including her own star-recruit to the reform camp, Ronald Reagan. Ironically, given her role in galvanizing Hollywood resistance to Soviet influence, de Havilland was denounced that same year (along with Danny Kaye, Frederic March, and Edward G. Robinson) as a "swimming-pool pink" by Time magazine and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 due to her vocal liberal activism in this period.

De Havilland appeared sporadically in films after the 1950s and attributed this partly to the growing permissiveness of Hollywood films of the period. She declined the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, allegedly citing the unsavory nature of some elements of the script and saying there were certain lines she could not allow herself to speak. De Havilland denied this in a 2006 interview, saying she had recently given birth to her son when offered the role, which had been a life altering experience, and was unable to relate to the material. The role went to her Gone with the Wind co-star, Vivien Leigh, who won her second Academy Award for her role.

Of her few film appearances in the 1960s, chiefly notable are Lady in a Cage (1964), as a crippled widow trapped in a lift and terrorised by intruders, Robert Aldrich's Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Sam Peckinpah's TV film of Katherine Anne Porter's novella Noon Wine (1966). In 1965, she was the first woman to preside over a Cannes jury. De Havilland continued acting on film until the late 1970s, afterward continuing her career on television until the late 1980s, highlighted by her winning a Golden Globe and earning a Emmy Award nomination for her performance as the Dowager Empress Maria in the 1986 miniseries Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna.

In 2008, de Havilland was awarded the United States National Medal of Arts.