French-British-American actress, a sweet, soft-voiced movie star during Hollywood’s golden era in the 1930s and 1940s. She was the last of the surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema upon her death in 2020 at age 104. De Havilland received two Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role, plus honours such as the National Medal of the Arts, the Légion d’honneur, and the appointment to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She arrived in Hollywood in 1934, a 17-year-old actress under contract to Warner Brothers Studio. Paired with the Hollywood idol, Errol Flynn, she soon went on to fame as the saintly Melanie Wilkes in the much anticipated 1939 film Gone With the Wind. Her film career in the ’40s included Oscar winning performances in To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949) co-starring Montgomery Clift.
De Havilland was born in Japan, the daughter of a lawyer father who worked in Tokyo. She and her younger sister Joan Fontaine (later also a noted actress) left Tokyo in 1919 with their mother who brought them to the U.S. De Havilland was an excellent student but money was tight during the Great Depression. At 16, she won a scholarship to Mills College, but she turned the opportunity down in order to find work to support herself. With the advice of Max Reinhardt she signed a film studio contract. Her film debut was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935.
In her first ten years in Hollywood, she made 30 films, many as the love interest of dazzling matinee star Errol Flynn, such as Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and Dodge City (1939). She delivered an unforgettable performance in Gone With the Wind. She received critical reviews for Dark Mirror (1946), The Snake Pit (1948) and was nominated for an Oscar for Hold Back the Dawn. She appeared in the television mini-series, Roots: The Next Generation in 1979, and Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986) for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Television Movie or Series.
In the ’30s and ’40s in Hollywood, De Havilland lived a highly disciplined life under contract to Warner Brothers. She felt obligated to the moral clauses in her contract and the presence of studio censors was enough to keep the actress out of trouble. Though she was deeply attracted to her leading man, Errol Flynn, she refused to be tempted into an affair fearing the moral consequences. She fell in love with novelist Marcus Aurelius Goodrich and they married in August 1946. Goodrich was almost 19 years her senior and impressed de Havilland with his intellectual brilliance. She gave birth to their son Benjamin in 1949 and the couple divorced in 1952. De Havilland had a weakness for smart, intelligent men and when she met French intellectual Pierre Gallante he was able to persuade the actress to leave Hollywood and move to Paris to be with him. Unhappy with the ever-shrinking film industry in the 1950s De Havilland left her Hollywood career. She married Gallante in April 1955 and gave birth to their daughter Gisèle the following year. Her marriage to Gallante ended in divorce in 1979. She and her adult daughter had a close mother-daughter relationship and enjoyed travelling the world together. They lived together in a large townhouse off the Avenue Foch near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. She lived in Paris for 20 years, returning to Washington, DC in 1978.
On whether it was better to marry in order not to live alone, she said, “Believe me, there is nothing worse in life than a bad marriage! Nothing lonelier than that. A woman can survive loneliness. Yes, even longing for a man. You can get over a man. It’s difficult, but I’ve done it. Sometimes it’s more important to remain unfulfilled in love and preserve your integrity, your independence, your personal honour.”
In 1998, Gone With the Wind was re-released in Los Angeles and across the nation’s movie theaters. De Havilland, 82, was one of the few living actors from the monumental film.
De Havilland died of natural causes in her sleep at her home in Paris, France, on 25 July 2020 at the age of 104. After the passing of fellow contemporary Kirk Douglas in February 2020, she was noted as the last major star from the Golden Age of Hollywood still to be living.

Link to Wikipedia biography