75 YEARS AGO
Say what you will about “Gone With the Wind” — and it’s all been said — it had a heck of a cast. Just one marquee name from the movie, released 75 years ago this week, survives. Olivia de Havilland, the saintly Melanie, is 98 and lives in Paris.
History will forever give Vivien Leigh top billing (except in Ashley’s heart), but Ms. de Havilland, three years younger, was the first of the two to achieve film stardom.
It started slowly. Her earliest mention in a film review in The Times was in July 1935, for “Alibi Ike,” an adaptation of a Ring Lardner baseball story. “Bringing up the rear guard of the cast, and doing it quite well, too,” Frank S. Nugent wrote, was “Olivia de Havilland, a charming newcomer.” Later that summer came “The Irish in Us,” a James Cagney vehicle. “Olivia de Havilland is the girl,” the reviewer wrote. Well, yes.
But the catapult to stardom for Ms. de Havilland was really the swashbuckling newcomer Errol Flynn. The first of a handful of films they paired in was “Captain Blood,” which had its premiere in December that year. In his review in The Times, Andre Sennwald wrote that “Olivia de Havilland is a lady of rapturous loveliness and well worth fighting for.”
The next year, the stars were together again for “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which, Mr. Nugent wrote, featured Ms. de Havilland “as the attractive, but thematically unnecessary, officer’s daughter.”
With these four movies under her Scarlett-svelte belt, as well as Max Reinhardt’s adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Ms. de Havilland, still just 20, merited her own feature in The Times. Under the headline “Strolling With Olivia,” the unnamed writer described “a very pleasant young lady with no airs about her,” who “still suffers terribly from stage fright” even though she was a champion high school debater.
“This embarrassing condition descended upon her during her career on the hustings for dear old Los Gatos High School and forced her to give up debating just after she had won, with the help of statistics and stuff gleaned from the columns of our v.o. Sunday Times, a slashing victory for the right of Germany to rearm.”
