![]() In Washington Square James lays such hard facts within the structure (though not the moral simplicity) of a romantic fable. ![]() No matter how delicate James’s observations, his insistence on the hard facts of money, power, influence, and property fuels the engine of his stories. Like The Europeans, which was published in 1878, Washington Square, from 1880, combines humor and an acute and sometimes merciless perception of the way the world works. But The Heiress, despite certain alterations of James’s drama, has a concentrated beauty and potency that has never been equaled by any other adaptation of James. Watching the opening scenes of The Heiress, one feels a certain exasperation: All this conventional busy-ness (Olivia de Havilland, as Catherine Sloper, throws her formal gown over her head and then runs down the stairs like a sixteen-year-old) seems wrong for James’s study of domination, submission, love, and rebellion, an intense drama built on blunt exchanges and pages of psychological analysis. In 1949, the great Hollywood director William Wyler ( The Letter, The Best Years of Our Lives) mounted an adaptation not of Washington Square itself, but of The Heiress-the theatrical version of James’s novel which the writing team of Augustus and Ruth Goetz had brought to Broadway in 1947. ![]() Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie”), all of which is a slightly cloying and over-insistent setting of the period for the American audience. Respect, from those who remember her work, she certainly earned.At the beginning of the first and best movie adaptation of Washington Square, we see the following: a petit point of the square itself, which fades into a photograph and then a kind of tableau vivant-carriages moving before a handsome townhouse, a boy corralling some fowls, life bursting out all over and we hear the familiar French song, “Plaisir d’Amour” (“Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment. She largely stayed out of the public eye, except when she sued the makers of the FX miniseries Feud for allegedly misrepresenting her in 2017, and appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court (which declined to take it up).īack when she was 18, at the screen test with Errol Flynn that would launch her career as a love interest and beyond, de Havilland remembered Flynn turning to her: "He said to me, 'What do you want out of life?' And I said, 'I would like respect for difficult work well done.' " She married, had a son, divorced and when she was 37, in 1953, she left Hollywood for Paris, where she lived the rest of her life. By the '50s, she appeared in films less and less. This is despite the fact that most of de Havilland's adult life was spent far from Hollywood. "I think a lot of Hollywood women stars are pitted against each other, but they were estranged their whole adult lives." "The biographers have a field day with the rivalry," White says. Fontaine wrote a tell-all memoir portraying de Havilland as a cruel older sister, and de Havilland always told interviewers that the topic was absolutely off limits. Legend has it, de Havilland never congratulated her sister for her win and they barely spoke again. The Two-Way Joan Fontaine, 'Coolly Beautiful' Oscar Winner, Diesīut de Havilland lost several other key Oscars in her career: She didn't win one for Melanie in Gone With the Wind, and in 1942 she lost best actress to her sister, Joan Fontaine. Stuart will not be able to go on opening night.' Reinhardt turned to me and he said, 'You will play the part.' " In a 2006 interview for the Academy of Achievement, de Havilland recalled what happened next: " said to Reinhardt, 'We're very sorry, but Ms. Gloria Stuart was cast as Hermia, but five days before opening night at the Hollywood Bowl, Stuart's agent came to a rehearsal. She was in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Northern California, where she grew up, and that little part earned her an understudy spot in legendary director Max Reinhardt's production of the play. "She brings that sort of plain look to all of her viewers, allowing them to sort of see a non-glamorous person, like perhaps themselves, as the heroine in their own stories."ĭe Havilland got to that iconic role thanks to a lucky break when she was only 17. "Olivia really was perfect for Melanie," White says. Patricia White, a professor of film studies at Swarthmore College, says de Havilland's Melanie was like a heroine from an 18th-century British novel: full of composure, with an unflashy beauty. But of all her good-girl roles, she's best remembered for Melanie, Scarlett O'Hara's sweet foil in Gone With the Wind. She died at her home in Paris of natural causes, her publicist, Lisa Goldberg, confirmed.ĭe Havilland was known for playing the good girl - pure hearted, pensive, deeply emotive - during Hollywood's golden era. Olivia de Havilland, who starred in dozens of movies through the 1930s and '40s, has died at age 104.
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