Oscar-Winning Gone With The Wind Actress Olivia De Havilland Dies At 104
Image Credit – The Guardian
Renowned Gone with the Wind actress Olivia de Havilland has died at the age of 104 from natural causes on 26th July in her residence in Paris.
The fragrant queen of the Hollywood costume drama had made a tremendous impact on the audience for her performance as stoical Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind. He had her proud moment winning two best actress Oscars, the first for her role in 1946’s To Each His Own and the second for The Heiress in 1949.
The older sister to actor Joan Fontaine was born in Tokyo and later moved to California where she was raised. Debuting in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the born-actress soon bagged eight collaborations with Errol Flynn, including turns in Captain Blood, They Died With Their Boots On and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Known for her modest and beautiful roles, De Havilland considered playing bad girls were a bore as playing a good girl required more from an actress. But in real life, she was a woman of steel as she sued Warner Bros in a landmark ruling that helped break the stranglehold of the US studio system.
In the later years, De Havilland appeared in the 1948 drama The Snake Pit, winning praise for her critically acclaimed portrayal of mental illness. In the mid-1950s she permanently moved to Paris due to screen credits dwindled. She later resumed acting in Lady in a Cage, Robert Aldrich’s Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and the 1970s TV miniseries Roots: The Next Generation. She also enjoyed teaching Sunday school at her local church in later days.
She acquired the National Medal of Arts in 2008 and next year she played the part of the narrator in the 2009 Alzheimer’s documentary I Remember Better When I Paint. Her lawsuit against the TV show Feud: Bette and Joan in 2018, was dismissed at the court.
Depicting acting as a fantasy life, she claimed that the allure of acting was lost to her. In the interview, she insisted that once she needed that life of imagination and her film career satisfied that need but the charm is lost to her now.
De Havilland is survived by her daughter, Gisele Galante Chulak. Actors all over the glove had paid their homage to the actress on their social media.
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