Olivia de Havilland, the Hollywood costume drama’s fragrant queen, has died at 104.
Her publicist said she’d died from natural causes in Paris, where she lived, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Although De Havilland won two of Oscar’s best actresses for her roles in To Each His Own in 1946 and The Heiress in 1949, she remains best known for her portrayal as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind.
In 2008, she won the National Medal of Arts and returned briefly from retirement to narrate the 2009 Alzheimer’s documentary I Remember Better When I Paint.
She filed a case against the television show Feud: Bette and Joan (about the dispute between fellow stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford) in 2018, but the suit was thrown out.
In later life, she insisted, acting had largely lost its allure. “Life is too full of events of great importance,” she told one interviewer.
“That is more absorbing and enriching than a fantasy life. I don’t need a fantasy life as once I did.
That is the life of the imagination and I had a great need for it. Films were the perfect means of satisfying that need.”