Olivia de Havilland

The end of slavery in the studios

Olivia de Havilland would not take no for an answer when it came to her professional freedom. In 1943, she decided to sue Warner Bros. because the studio sought to extend her seven-year contract by adding suspension periods. That legal battle ended the studio system as it had been known up to that point.

The ruling held that a seven-year contract meant seven calendar years, not seven years of actual work. That legal victory is still known as the De Havilland Law, and it allowed actors to stop being the property of the great studio moguls. But the price was a temporary ban that kept her away from the cameras for two grueling years.

And the gamble paid off.

Before she reached the courts, she was born in Tokyo in 1916. Her mother was a stage actress who moved the family to California after divorcing a British diplomat. There, she began taking part in school plays, where a talent scout discovered her for the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Max Reinhardt.

She signed with Warner Bros. and was soon typecast as the damsel in distress. She made eight films with Errol Flynn, including Captain Blood in 1935 and The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. But she was looking for characters with more edge and less decorum.

Melanie's Shadow and Warner's Steel

In 1939, she had to beg Jack Warner's wife to intercede so that she could be loaned out to a rival studio. David O. Selznick wanted her to play Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind. It was the only supporting role she accepted, because she understood that this kind-hearted woman was the true moral center of the story.

That shoot was utter chaos, with rewritten scripts and fired directors. But De Havilland's performance earned her first Oscar nomination. Melanie Hamilton haunted her for decades and shaped the public's perception of her real character.

Her rivalry with her sister Joan Fontaine fueled gossip magazines for half a century. The two competed for the Best Actress Oscar in 1942, and Fontaine took home the statuette for Suspicion. Contemporary accounts say Olivia tried to congratulate her backstage and received a public snub that ended their relationship for good.

But her professional comeback came after the forced hiatus caused by the lawsuit.

In 1946, she won her first Oscar for To Each His Own, playing an unwed mother who must give up her child. Three years later she repeated the feat with The Heiress, where she transformed her sweet image into that of a bitter, vengeful woman under the direction of William Wyler. That role earned her second Oscar and total freedom to choose her projects.

The French retreat and the final legal battle

In the mid-1950s, she decided to turn her back on the Los Angeles industry. She married journalist Pierre Galante and settled into a three-story house near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. She lived there for the rest of her life, away from the spotlight but keeping an eye on changes in European cinema.

She only returned to the United States for very specific projects or selected television appearances. In 1964, she starred in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, replacing Joan Crawford after the latter dropped out. It was one of her last major big-screen roles before she focused on her private life in France.

She never stopped fighting for her public image.

In 2017, she filed a lawsuit against the network FX over the series Feud: Bette and Joan, arguing that her identity had been used without permission and in an offensive way. The actress Catherine Zeta-Jones played her in the show, and De Havilland felt the dialogue damaged her reputation as a dignified woman. She was 101 years old when she launched this legal battle against the streaming giants.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her case in 2018, citing the creators' freedom of expression. Olivia de Havilland died in her sleep at her Paris residence on July 26, 2020. She was 104 years old and still held the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, awarded in 2017.