page_title: Olivia de Havilland
section_title: Career assessment and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Olivia de Havilland / Career assessment and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Olivia de Havilland's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6762 Hollywood Blvd.
context_page_description: Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland DBE was a British-American actress. The major works of her cinematic career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films and was one of the leading actresses of her time. She was the last major surviving star from the Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema and the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner until her death in July 2020. Her younger sister was the actress Joan Fontaine.
  De Havilland first came to prominence with Errol Flynn as a screen couple in adventure films such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. One of her best-known roles is that of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind, for which she received her first of five Oscar nominations, the only one for Best Supporting Actress.
  De Havilland departed from ingénue roles in the 1940s and later distinguished herself for performances in Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own, The Snake Pit, and The Heiress, receiving nominations for Best Actress for each and winning for To Each His Own and The Heiress. She was also successful in work on stage and television.
context_section_description: De Havilland's career spanned 53 years, from 1935 to 1988. During that time, she appeared in 49 feature films, and was one of the leading movie stars during the golden age of Classical Hollywood. She began her career playing demure ingénues opposite male stars such as Errol Flynn, with whom she made her breakout film Captain Blood in 1935. They would go on to make eight more feature films together, and became one of Hollywood's most successful on-screen romantic pairings. Her range of performances included roles in most major movie genres. Following her film debut in the Shakespeare adaptation A Midsummer Night's Dream, de Havilland achieved her initial popularity in romantic comedies, such as The Great Garrick and Hard to Get, and Western adventure films, such as Dodge City and Santa Fe Trail. In her later career, she was most successful in drama films, such as In This Our Life and Light in the Piazza, and psychological dramas playing non-glamorous characters in films such as The Dark Mirror, The Snake Pit, and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
  During her career, de Havilland won two Academy Awards (To Each His Own and The Heiress), two Golden Globe Awards (The Heiress and Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna), two New York Film Critics Circle Awards (The Snake Pit and The Heiress), the National Board of Review Award, and the Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup (The Snake Pit), and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination (Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna).
  For her contributions to the motion picture industry, de Havilland received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6762 Hollywood Boulevard on February 8, 1960. Following her retirement in 1988, her lifetime contribution to the arts was honoured on two continents. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hertfordshire in 1998 and another from Mills College in 2018.
  In 2006, she was inducted into the Online Film & Television Association Award Film Hall of Fame.
  The moving-image collection of Olivia de Havilland is held at the Academy Film Archive, which preserved a nitrate reel of a screen test for Danton, Max Reinhardt's never-produced follow-up to A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935).
  De Havilland, as a confidante and friend of Bette Davis, is featured in the series Feud: Bette and Joan, portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. In the series, de Havilland reflects on the origins and depth of the Davis–Crawford feud and how it affected contemporary female Hollywood stars. On June 30, 2017, a day before her 101st birthday, she filed a lawsuit against FX Networks and producer Ryan Murphy for inaccurately portraying her and using her likeness without permission. Although FX attempted to strike the suit as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Holly Kendig denied the motion in September 2017, and also granted de Havilland's request to advance the trial date (a motion for preference) and set trial for November 2017. An interlocutory appeal of Judge Kendig's ruling was argued in March 2018. A three-justice panel of the California Court of Appeal for the Second District ruled against the defamation suit brought by De Havilland (that is, by ruling the trial court erred in denying the defendants' motion to strike), in a published opinion by Justice Anne Egerton that affirmed the right of filmmakers to embellish the historical record and that such portrayals are protected by the First Amendment. De Havilland appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in September 2018, which declined to review the case.
caption: Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6762 Hollywood Blvd.[282]
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