Death finally ended the feud between Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland

This week’s death of Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine at 96 brings to an end to conceivably Hollywood’s longest sibling feud, as her sister, Oscar-winning actress Olivia de Havilland, 97, expressed her grief from her home in Paris. It’s probably the kindest public statement either sister had expressed for decades, as their famous battle had raged for years.

 Joan was born only 15 months after Olivia, sparking a sibling rivalry that began while both were still in cribs, then quickly escalated to all-out physical fights. (In her memoir, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine claimed that de Havilland once fractured her collarbone.) That rivalry intensified when both girls eventually became actresses, possibly to please their stage-struck mother. And by 1940, both women were not just actresses, but extremely prominent ones: de Havilland had started a long and popular screen pairing with swashbuckler Errol Flynn, and snagged the second female lead in the 1939 blockbuster Gone With The Wind, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Fontaine (who changed her last name twice) won the lead in Hitchcock’s first American picture, 1940’s Rebecca,receiving a Best Actress nomination. At the 1942 Oscars, both were nominated for Best Actress, Fontaine defeated her sister by winning for Hitchcock’s Suspicion, and the battle was on.

The most famous representation of their feud happened in 1947, when de Havilland received her own Oscar for To Each His Own (her first of two). Fontaine, having just presented the Best Actor award, went to congratulate her sister and was famously snubbed, with Olivia walking right by Joan’s outstretched hand. The sisters continued like this, battling over awards, parts, and men (including oil magnate Howard Hughes), but their final rift came when their mother died in 1975. Fontaine says that she wasn’t even informed of her mother’s death; de Havilland said that Fontaine didn’t want to attend the memorial. Their estrangement became permanent. When both were invited to commemorative Oscar ceremonies honoring past winners, they were kept to opposite sides of the stage; in 1989, given adjacent hotel rooms for another Oscar presentation, Fontaine switched rooms, and never attended the Oscars again. 

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg recently interviewed both nonagenarians, shedding some new light on the sisters’ rivalry. At the time, Fontaine told Feinberg that the famous feud with her sister was “nonexistent” and “had no basis.” Nevertheless, it certainly seemed to exist while Fontaine was promoting her autobiography in 1978, when she predicted, "Olivia has always said I was first at everything: I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she'll be furious, because again I'll have got there first!" But de Havilland’s rare public statement this week seemed to contain only grief: "I was shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of my sister, Joan Fontaine, and my niece, Deborah, and I appreciate the many kind expressions of sympathy that we have received." All it took to end their feud was death.   

Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland, in full Olivia Mary de Havilland   (born July 1, 1916, Tokyo,Japan), American motion-picture actress remembered for the lovely and gentle ingenues of her early career as well as for the later, more substantial roles she fought to secure.

The daughter of a British patent attorney, de Havilland and her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, moved to California in 1919 with their mother, an actress. While attending school, de Havilland was chosen from the cast of a local California production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to play Hermia in a 1935 Warner Brothers film version of that play. As the sweet-tempered beauty to Errol Flynn’s gallant swain, she appeared in many costume adventure movies of the 1930s and ’40s, including Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and They Died with Their Boots On (1941). She also played romantic leading roles in Strawberry Blonde (1941), Hold Back the Dawn (1941), and The Male Animal (1942) and portrayed Melanie Wilkes inGone with the Wind (1939).

In 1945 de Havilland won a precedent-setting case against Warner Brothers, which released her from a six-month penalty obligation appended by the studio to her seven-year contract. Free to take more challenging roles, she gave Academy Award-winning performances in To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). She also gave a superb performance in The Snake Pit (1948). De Havilland moved to France in 1955 and worked infrequently in films after that, most memorably in The Light in the Piazza (1962), Lady in a Cage (1964), and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). She also appeared in a number of television plays.

'She will never forget her': Agony of actress Olivia de Havilland as death of her sister Joan Fontaine finally brings an end to their life-long feud

Hollywood legend Olivia de Havilland was today ‘in mourning’ over the death of her equally famous sister Joan Fontaine, telling friends: ‘I’ll never forget her’.

The Oscar-winning actress is now almost 97, and living in an upmarket apartment block close to the Arc de Triumphe in Paris.

She and her sister were notorious for their bitter quarrels, and barely spent any time together during their long and successful screen careers.

But on Monday Ms De Havilland issued a statement saying she was ‘shocked and saddened’ by Joan’s death on Sunday at the age of 96.

‘Joan was her kid sister – of course she’s hugely sad at her passing,’ said one of Ms De Havilland’s friends in the French capital.

‘She’s certainly in mourning and has made it clear that she will never forget Joan.’

Olivia has been bombarded with flowers and letters since Sunday night, and said in her statement that she was overwhelmed by ‘the many kind expressions of sympathies.’

Ms De Havilland and Ms Fontaine, who lived in California at the time of her death, were among Hollywood's most famous sisters.

Both were nominated for the best actress Oscar in 1941, and Ms Fontaine won it for her role in the film ‘Suspicion’.

Scroll down for video

Long feud: Sisters Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine were born just 15 months apart

Recalling the awards ceremony many years later, Ms Fontaine said: ‘All the animus we'd felt toward each other as children, the hair pullings, the savage wrestling matches, the time Olivia fractured my collarbone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery.

‘My paralysis was total. I felt Olivia would spring across the table and grab me by the hair.

Left to right: Fontaine opposite Laurence Olivier in Rebecca (he had wanted the part of the second Mrs de Winter to go to his real life soon-to-be wife, Vivien Leigh); and with Orson Welles in Jane Eyre

Joan Fontaine, star of Hitchcock classics, dies at 96

Loaded: 0%

Progress: 0%

00:00

Play

Mute

Current Time0:00

/

Duration Time0:00

Fullscreen

Need Text

'I felt age 4, being confronted by my older sister. Damn it, I'd incurred her wrath again!’

Ms De Havilland is hugely respected in France, and was awarded the Legion of Honour by the then President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010.

She won two Oscars in all, including one for her part in in the 1947 film ‘To Each His Own’. 

Joan Fontaine (left) said the sibling rivalry was encouraged by their ambitious stage mother. It may have also had something to do with their similarity (the photo on the right, for example, is of Olivia de Havilland)

Olivia de Havilland pictured with Frederic Mitterrand at the 36th Cesar French Film Awards in Paris in 2011

When Fontaine tried to congratulate her for the 1947 award, Ms De Havilland ignored her, with a spokesman saying: ‘This goes back for years and years, ever since they were children.’

Ms Fontaine once told The Hollywood Reporter: ‘I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it.’

The Last Star: An evening with Olivia de Havilland

In 1940, 'Gone With the Wind' swept the Academy Awards. Now, 75 years later, Olivia de Havilland, the film's last surviving star, talks about losing to Hattie McDaniel, swooning for Errol Flynn, and vowing, at 98, to live at least a century.

• Share14841
 
• Tweet200
 
• Share on Google+45
 
• Share on Pinterest20
 
• Share on Tumblr

(John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images; Reed Saxon/AP)

Gone With The Wind

Posted January 29 2015 — 11:04 AM EST

The petite woman with an elegant swoop of white hair and a neat dash of red lipstick stands to greet her visitor with a hug. “Good evening!” Olivia de Havilland says, leaning in for a Continental two-cheek kiss. It is early January in Paris, and the actress has invited a journalist over for champagne and a chat. She is, of course, impeccably dressed in an embroidered black velvet gown and gold Chanel ballet flats, a strand of pearls knotted chicly at her chest.

The stately town house that has been de Havilland’s home for the past 58 years is undergoing repairs, so she receives her guest in her temporary quarters: a suite in an exclusive hotel that is located, quite fittingly for this grande dame of the silver screen, in a 19th-century château.

An assistant pours bubbly into two flutes. “What are we toasting?” de Havilland asks, raising her glass.

How about the hostess herself?

At 98, Olivia de Havilland is the last great star of Hollywood’s golden age, a woman who began her career during the rise of Technicolor in 1935, formed one of the most indelible screen couples of all time with Errol Flynn, and went on to work with James Cagney, Rita Hayworth, Montgomery Clift, Bette Davis, Richard Burton, Clark Gable, and Vivien Leigh. With her deep brown doe eyes and apple-cheeked smile, the two-time Best Actress winner excelled at playing heroines whose demure bearing belied a feisty core. The most famous of these great ladies was Melanie Hamilton, the tenderhearted foil to Leigh’s scheming Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With the Wind. Based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-seller, the beloved epic has sold more tickets in its lifetime than any other film. And 75 years ago it cleaned up at the Academy Awards, winning eight of its 13 nominations.

Having outlived all of her costars (as well as the movie’s mad-genius producer, David O. Selznick, and the three directors he hired to steer the massive ship), de Havilland has been GWTW’s principal spokesperson for almost five decades, the sole bearer of the Tara torch. It’s a privilege she calls “rather wonderful,” as her affection for the film is genuine and deep. She’s seen GWTW “about 30 times,” she says, and still enjoys watching it for the emotional jolt it brings as she reconnects with those costars—Gable, Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Leslie Howard—who have long since passed on.

“Luckily, it does not make me melancholy,” she says via email a few days after our meeting. (Though an expert raconteuse, she’s conscientious about facts—”I want to be a font of truth”—and will discuss the finer points of her career only in writing.) “Instead, when I see them vibrantly alive on screen, I experience a kind of reunion with them, a joyful one.”

Joy seems to be a dominant emotion in de Havilland’s world—at least this evening. Though her vision and hearing are somewhat limited, her mind is sharp. She is witty, warm, and engaged, her eyes bright as she spins yarn after lively yarn over the course of a three-hour conversation. “How’s this for an histoire?” she says in her deep, rich voice before launching into a tale of a slapstick bedpan mishap during a stay in a French hospital. Her speech is peppered with throwback words like golly, marvelous, and splendid. More than once, she summons her assistant by cupping her hands around her mouth and playfully calling, “Oh, dear giiirl!”

Her memory is enviable: She vividly recalls lying in her crib as a baby and hearing the clink-clink of her nanny preparing her bottle. And she is delightfully open about her age. While discussing her day-to-day life at the hotel, for instance, she gets a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she describes the handsome fellows from room service. “How many women in this world are served breakfast in bed every morning by a gorgeous young man? I am,” she says. “So how do I feel about older age? Crazy about it! Wouldn’t trade it for anything!”

Even before GWTW, de Havilland was a star. Born to British expats in Japan, she was raised in Saratoga, Calif., and became a contract player at Warner Bros. at age 18. It was there that she met Errol Flynn, the dashing Aussie playboy with whom she shared the screen eight times, most memorably in 1938’s giddy frolic The Adventures of Robin Hood, in which she played a spirited Maid Marian. Their chemistry was instant, yet despite rumors, de Havilland maintains they were never lovers off screen. “Oh, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Flynn! A cantankerous fate kept us together in films and apart in real life,” she writes. “Much as I have sometimes mourned this, if it had been otherwise I would never have played Melanie” and many others. “And who can say that our union would have lasted?” (Even over email, de Havilland is every bit the dowager of theatricality you want her to be.)

Fun as the Flynn pictures were, the actress felt confined at Warner Bros., which cast her in one stock love-interest part after another. If she turned a role down, she was suspended. “What bothered me was playing one-dimensional parts in films which were really about ‘Boy Meets Girl,’ ‘Will Boy Get Girl?’ (He always did),” she emails. “Those roles were intended simply to fill the routine function of ‘The Girl.’ Little, if any, character development was involved.” For a woman who herself was so much more than just “The Girl” in real life, she needed more.

So when an offer came from Selznick to play a character as fully drawn as Melanie—whose trials include giving birth while Atlanta falls to the Yankees—de Havilland knew it could spring her from her creative prison. “The role was just what I wanted, and just what I needed,” she says. Gentle and sincere, her performance earned de Havilland her first Oscar nomination, for Supporting Actress. But at the ceremony, the name called was Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy.

De Havilland was crushed. “When I returned home on Oscar night, aged 23 and the loser of the award…. I was convinced there was no God,” she says via email. But when she considered the historical significance of McDaniel becoming the first African-American to win, her loss didn’t seem so dramatic. And she cheered herself up by interpreting the Academy’s decision as vindication that she belonged in the lead category all along. “About two weeks later, I woke up and thought, ‘Oh, how wonderful! I wasn’t a supporting actress, and Hattie was, and she won! Those blessed voters were not misled for one minute…. I’d rather live in a world where someone who is a supporting actress wins against someone who, instead, is a star playing a starring role!… There is a God, after all!’ “

The real disappointment came back at Warner Bros., which still refused to offer her roles that cracked the superficial ingenue mold. So in 1943, de Havilland fought back. When the studio tried to extend her contract beyond seven years, she sued and won. Her moxie—a quality hardly encouraged in women back then—changed the industry. To this day the law that makes such practices illegal is called the de Havilland Decision. (The honor, she says, feels “absolutely marvelous!”)

For her, the ruling meant artistic freedom at last, and she made the most of it by entering into a golden age of her own. In 1947 she won Best Actress for her portrayal of an unwed mother in To Each His Own. In 1949 she was nominated again, for The Snake Pit, in which she starred as a patient in a mental hospital. On a roll, she then closed out the decade with William Wyler’s 1949 masterpiece, The Heiress. For her turn as a naive young woman who falls for a fortune hunter (Montgomery Clift), the Academy rewarded her with a second Best Actress statuette.

It was no less a figure than James Stewart, an ex-beau, who handed her the trophy on Oscar night. “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!” she writes. “How extraordinary that, almost exactly 10 years after we first met and you escorted me to the New York premiere of Gone With the Wind, it should be you who presented me with that second Oscar and escorted me off stage at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.”

As the hours glide by on this January evening, de Havilland reassures her guest that she is not overstaying her welcome. Gesturing to the champagne flute (which has been refilled numerous times), she says, “You pay attention to the little glass in front of you. When it’s empty, let that be your signal.” And so we keep drinking and talking.

When de Havilland moved to France in 1953 to marry her second husband, a Frenchman, she was all too happy to bid adieu to Hollywood, where television had begun to eclipse film. “The Golden Era…was dying and I knew that whatever replaced it would not be its equal,” she writes. So she focused on her children, Benjamin and Gisèle, took the occasional job by “commuting to Hollywood,” as her son once put it, and earned an Emmy nomination in 1987 for her role as a Russian empress in the NBC miniseries Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna. Even after her second divorce in 1979, living abroad afforded her a life of great privacy, which she continues to cherish. Tabloids frothed for years over her relationship with her sister, the actress Joan Fontaine, which was famously strained, at least according to Fontaine, who wrote about it in her 1978 autobiography. De Havilland, however, does not discuss it. (Fontaine died in 2013.)

Though she lives alone, de Havilland is far from lonely. She regularly speaks on the phone with Gisèle, who lives in California. (Benjamin passed away in 1991 from over-radiation following his treatment for cancer.) Depending on her energy level, she entertains about once a week. She is still a dues-paying member of the Academy and follows nomination season “with extreme interest,” but because of her declining eyesight, she no longer watches many films and does not vote. She can still do crossword puzzles, though, and in the coming months she hopes to make progress on the autobiography she began a few years ago. She’s written five chapters in the same buoyant style that she used in her charming 1962 book of essays, Every Frenchman Has One. A lover of words, she is enjoying mining her rich, long life for remembrances.

And if she has anything to do with it, she will collect many, many more. Because this formidable woman has every intention of celebrating her 100th birthday come July 1, 2016. “Oh, I can’t wait for it,” she says. “I’m certainly relishing the idea of living a century. Can you imagine that? What an achievement.”

The Interview: Olivia de Havilland

Philippe Biancotto/Figarophoto/Contour by Getty Images

BY JOHN MERONEY - DECEMBER/JANUARY 2015

The actress gives an inside account of the most successful film of all time

Would you consider doing something illegal? That's what director George Cukor asked the then twenty-two-year-old actress Olivia de Havilland when he phoned her in 1938. He was making an off-the-record call inviting her to defy the contract that tied her to Warner Bros. and read for the role of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. She auditioned and landed the part. But then came an even bigger task: persuading studio chief Jack Warner to release her to make a picture being produced by a rival studio.

But as anyone who knows the actress can attest, she relishes circumventing Hollywood’s edicts. “I called the boss’s wife,” she says, “and asked, ‘Would you consider having tea with me at the Brown Derby?’” Like most in Hollywood, Ann Warner had been glued to the Gone with the Wind novel and couldn’t wait to see it on the big screen. “I understand you,” Ann said, “and I will help you.” Before long, Jack Warner was signing documents permitting de Havilland to go across town to Culver Studios to appear in the epic. And the rest, as they say, is history.

De Havilland will begin her hundredth year next summer. Hers has been a lifetime of making bold, unorthodox decisions. When she was twenty-seven, she sued Warner Bros. to get out of that onerous contract, a case that paved the way for actors to work as independent artists (stars who now cash checks for millions owe her a debt of gratitude). In the 1950s, she married Paris Match editor Pierre Galante and moved to Paris, where she still lives, surrounded by accolades from a monumental career, including two Best Actress Oscar statuettes, the National Medal of Arts, and the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gone with the Wind’s December premiere at the Loew’s Grand Theatre in Atlanta, when more than 300,000 people lined the streets for a glimpse at its stars, de Havilland looks back on the most successful movie ever made.

What do you consider the most entertaining part of the picture?

The sequence at the charity ball and bazaar to benefit Atlanta’s Confederate military hospital—it’s filled with marvelously comic moments. But there’s a wonderful thread of humor that runs straight through the film. That greatly contributes to its unique vitality.

You’ve worked with such legendary directors as William Wyler, John Huston, and, on Gone with the Wind, Victor Fleming, who replaced George Cukor. Who got the best performance out of you?

They didn’t get the performances out of me. I gave the performances to them.

How did Fleming help you play Melanie?

Vivien Leigh and I were deeply attached to George and secretly sought his help all during the filming. But Victor really was the right director for this epic. The first time we worked together was when we filmed the scene where Melanie, engaged to Ashley and therefore the future mistress of Twelve Oaks, greets Scarlett. We rehearsed and I was warm, pleasant, and polite. He drew me aside and very gently observed, “Every word that Melanie says, she means.” That direction was an invaluable key to her character, and it served me throughout the film. Victor, with all his virility, was sensitive and insightful.

What’s your most vivid memory of the film’s premiere?

I was seated on Jock Whitney’s right. He was the financier and owner of the New York Herald Tribune. He was also an investor in Gone with the Wind. On his left were Margaret Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh. The audience was utterly captivated by the film. Total silence reigned—until the great panoramic scene at the Atlanta depot where we see, laid on stretchers, row upon row upon row of wounded Confederate soldiers. I heard John say to Margaret, “Why, if we’da had that many soldiers we’da won the wawah!”

When the picture was released, Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her role as Mammy, couldn’t fully participate in the festivities because of Jim Crow. How were the black actors treated during filming?

As fellow actors!

You were born in Japan and have lived most of your life overseas. Yet you’re in this movie that’s now regarded as Americana of the highest order. Does being inGone with the Wind make up for all the years you’ve lived outside of the United States?

Well, I have, indeed, lived most of my life overseas, but I’ve returned repeatedly to work in film, special television productions, and the New York theater. There have also been tributes and similar occasions that have called me back to Hollywood. I’ve returned so often, I almost feel that I’ve never left.

How do the French regard Gone with the Wind?

In the words of a French friend of mine, “We think that it is one of the most important, the most romantic, and the most enchanting films in the world.”

You dined with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House. Do you know whether Roosevelt liked the film?

I don’t. But I do remember an item reported in the press that the president was trying to get a good night’s sleep on the night his family ran Gone with the Wind at the White House. He complained vociferously about the amount of time Sherman was taking to win the Battle of Atlanta.

What did you discuss with him?

He thought every American should own an acre of land. The country was then in the grip of the Depression. Millions were not only starving but were without resources of any kind. I think the president felt that through owning and cultivating an acre of land, most Americans could be self-sustaining in case of catastrophe. He may well have been influenced by the role that Tara played in Scarlett’s life—it sustained her. Then there were Gerald O’Hara’s words: “Land is the only thing in the world worth working for…because it’s the only thing that lasts.”

You’ve won the highest honors for contributions to the arts and culture in two countries. What means more—all those first-class prizes, or being in the most popular movie ever made?