Olivia De Havilland, the actress who took Hollywood to court and won

Olivia De Havilland

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 1, 1916 Tokyo, Japan
Died	July 26, 2020 (104)
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Gone with the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Heiress
Awards	2 Academy Award · Golden Globe · American National Medal of Arts · Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, France · Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, DBE

When Warner Bros. informed Olivia De Havilland that the months she had spent under suspension — the studio’s punishment for refusing inferior roles — would be added to her contract, the implication was precise: every time she had refused, she was extending her sentence. She hired a lawyer and sued. The case, De Havilland v. Warner Bros., reached two California courts and produced a ruling that redrew the legal boundary between an actor and her employer. California Labor Code Section 2855 — known since as the De Havilland Law — established that a personal service contract could not extend beyond seven calendar years from signing, regardless of suspension periods. She won in December 1944. The law is still on the books.

She had arrived in Hollywood by a route that began in Tokyo. Her parents, Walter de Havilland, a British patent attorney, and Lilian Fontaine, a trained actress, had settled in Japan when Olivia was born on the first day of July 1916. Three years later, after her parents’ marriage ended, her mother took the two daughters — Olivia and her younger sister Joan — to California. Walter de Havilland remained in Japan. The sisters grew up in Saratoga, California, in a household where performance was already a vocation.

Olivia found her way to the stage through a student production, and it was on stage rather than in a studio that she was first noticed. Max Reinhardt, the Austrian director, was staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934 when Olivia, playing Hermia, caught the attention of Warner Bros. She signed a contract and appeared in Reinhardt’s film adaptation the following year, and in the same year opposite Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. The chemistry between them was unmistakable to everyone who saw the rushes, and the studio made immediate use of it.

Between 1935 and 1941, she and Flynn appeared together in eight films. Most were adventure pictures built to the studio’s commercial specifications — reliable, polished, and largely interchangeable. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz, was the exception. She played Maid Marian as a woman who assesses the situation around her and makes deliberate choices, which was a different kind of screen presence than the era typically offered. The film is still shown; the performance still holds.

The film that most expanded the public’s sense of her range was not an Errol Flynn picture. In 1939, David O. Selznick cast her as Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind. The role required her to embody moral steadiness and quiet confidence against a backdrop of overwrought sentiment, and the Academy nominated her for Best Supporting Actress. The award went to Hattie McDaniel, also from the same film — the first Oscar awarded to a Black performer. It was a worthy result; it was also the moment that clarified, for Olivia, that the studio system’s categories for her would need to be broken before she could work on her own terms.

She refused roles. Warner Bros. suspended her. The suspension periods accumulated, and the studio’s accounting added them to her contract. By 1943, a seven-year agreement had in practice become longer than it was supposed to be. The suit she filed that year challenged the studio’s interpretation of California labor law. Two courts ruled against Warner Bros. in 1944, and the California Supreme Court declined to hear the studio’s appeal in 1945. She emerged free, with legal precedent behind her that every contract player in Hollywood could eventually point to. The studios understood the implications slowly, but they understood them.

The work that followed the lawsuit was the best of her career. Mitchell Leisen directed her in To Each His Own (1946) as Josephine Norris, a woman who gives up her illegitimate son and watches him grow up believing she is a stranger. The Academy gave her its award for Best Actress. Two years later, Anatole Litvak directed The Snake Pit (1948), casting her as Virginia Cunningham, a woman admitted to a state psychiatric hospital whose inner life the film refuses to simplify. Litvak and De Havilland had spent months researching actual conditions in American institutions, and the film’s unsparing specificity was disturbing enough to prompt legislatures in twelve states to reform their mental health laws. The Academy nominated her again for Best Actress.

Then came The Heiress (1949), directed by William Wyler and adapted from Henry James’s novel Washington Square. She played Catherine Sloper, a plain, intelligent, deeply lonely woman whose wealthy father underestimates her and whose suitor proves the father’s cruelty through betrayal. Wyler demanded dozens of takes and tolerated no softening of the character’s hardening clarity. The performance she delivered by the end of the shoot — particularly the final sequence, in which Catherine climbs the stairs and leaves her suitor to hammer at the locked door below — stands as one of the most precisely controlled pieces of acting the studio era produced. The Academy gave her its award for Best Actress a second time. She remains one of the few performers to win the top acting prize twice in four consecutive years.

The question of Joan Fontaine runs through any serious account of Olivia De Havilland’s life, and it resists tidy resolution. The two sisters had, from early in their careers, occupied the same professional space with different results at different moments. Joan won her Oscar — for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) — at the same ceremony where Olivia was nominated for Hold Back the Dawn and lost. The professional proximity fed a public narrative of rivalry that both sisters occasionally confirmed and occasionally denied. The estrangements between them were real, sometimes lasting years; their reported causes ranged from wounds carried from a California childhood to simpler temperamental incompatibility. Joan Fontaine died in December 2013. Olivia De Havilland did not attend the memorial. It was, in its way, a fitting close to a relationship the press had spent decades simplifying into a story it could follow.

In the mid-1950s, she moved to Paris and married Pierre Galante, the editor of Paris Match. The city became her permanent home. She continued to accept film and television roles, but at a pace and selectivity that marked a clean break from the studio system’s volume. Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), a horror-thriller directed by Robert Aldrich and filmed in Louisiana, gave her a project of genuine interest: she replaced Bette Davis when Davis withdrew mid-production, and her character, Miriam Deering, enters the film as a figure of apparent calm and reasonableness who proves to be carrying a secret that the film slowly turns. The picture belongs to the Grand Guignol tradition in Southern Gothic clothes, and it holds together.

Television offered what cinema no longer consistently required. Her performance in the 1986 miniseries Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series, her last major competitive award. She was near seventy at the time of filming. By then, the industry’s formal recognitions had shifted from competitive to commemorative. The American National Medal of Arts came in 2008. France made her a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2010. In June 2017, two weeks before her hundred-and-first birthday, the United Kingdom appointed her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire — the oldest woman ever to receive the distinction at the time.

She died in Paris on July 26, 2020, at the age of one hundred and four. The documentary The Rebellious Olivia de Havilland, directed by Daphné Baiwir and released the following year, drew from archival footage and interviews to examine the career through the frame she had always placed at its centre: not the studio’s preferred version, not the gracious heroine, but the decisions of a performer who understood that the system required challenging before it could be properly used. Captain Blood arrived on 4K Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection in January 2025, placing the beginning of her career in the company it deserves.

The De Havilland Law remains in effect in California. Actors still invoke it when studios attempt to hold them beyond the seven-year mark. The two Academy Awards belong to her estate. The law outlasts both of them.

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