Olivia de Havilland Interview (page: 2 / 9) Legendary Leading Lady	Print Interview

What attracted you to the role of Melanie? You said that you believed you could really bring something to this character.

Olivia de Havilland: Well, the main thing is people wondered --

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Jack [Warner], for example, said, "Oh, you don't want to play Melanie. You want to play Scarlett." I said, "I don't want to play Scarlett. I want Melanie." It's because I was so young. I had for four years been earning my own living, going through all the problems of a career woman, self-supporting and even contributing to the support of others, which is what Scarlett did. That's what Scarlett did. So, I knew about being Scarlett in a sense, but Melanie was someone different. She had very, deeply feminine qualities. Scarlett was a self-absorbed person. She had to be. Career women have to be, that's all there is to it. But, Melanie was "other people-oriented," and she had these feminine qualities that I felt were very endangered at that time, and they are from generation to generation, and that somehow they should be kept alive, and one way I could contribute to their being kept alive was to play Melanie, and that's why I wanted to interpret her role.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

What were those characteristics you felt were endangered? What was it about Melanie?

Olivia de Havilland: The main thing is that she was always thinking of the other person, and the interesting thing to me is that she was a happy person. Scarlett was not a happy woman, all self-generated and preoccupied, but there's Melanie, "other people-oriented," a happy woman, loving, compassionate. She had this marvelous capacity to relate to people with whom she would normally have no relationship. For example, look at her behavior with Belle Watlin, absolutely astounding, marvelous.

She believed in the best in people, didn't she?

Olivia de Havilland: Yes. Yes. And, of course, all people have something wonderful about them. She was not mistaken.

You have said that a profound influence on you as an actress was a comment that James Cagney made to you about what it means to act.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Olivia de Havilland: Thrust into my profession without any training whatsoever, I had to just flounder and just find my way. It was an agonizing experience. It's like jumping off a diving board in the Olympic contest without knowing how to swim or dive, and I just had to find my way. So one day, I said to Jimmy Cagney, "Jimmy, what is acting?" and he said, "I don't know." He said, "All I can tell you is whatever you say, mean it," and I thought that marvelous counsel. It is key. Wonderful.

You have said that your style of preparing for a scene was quite different than that of your co-star Vivien Leigh. Did you have different attitudes about that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Olivia de Havilland: Vivien was just a marvel. She was a hard worker, highly professional, a marvel, and between scenes, she had this other capacity. It took a long time to light up the sets as you can well imagine Technicolor in those days. Three cameras, all of these strips of film, three-strip cameras, and all of that required quite special lighting and a lot of time to set the scenes in that way. So Vivien, in between, would find a little quiet place on the set, and she and [Clark] Gable would play a game called Battleship, and occasionally, they would invite me to join them, and I would play. The assistant director would come and give us warning. He would say, "Ten minutes," something like that, and I would excuse myself to go back to my dressing room, not only to check the makeup, but also try to recapture the character of Melanie, which often, just looking in the mirror -- because the costumes, and the hair and all of that did express her so well -- I would need that time. Not Vivien. She would leave. They would say, "We're ready to shoot or ready to rehearse," and she would get up from the game of Battleship, go straight into the scene, and play it brilliantly. She was fabulous, fabulous.

What impact did the firing of George Cukor as director have on the two of you? You had worked with Cukor in developing these roles of Scarlett and Melanie.

Olivia de Havilland: Oh, yes. It was a frightful shock.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Two or three weeks after we had begun shooting, we learned that George Cukor would be leaving the film. It was devastating for Vivien and for me because we had set our characters under his direction, and for consistency and continuity, we would depend on him and his assistance and direction. The thought of having another director come on the set was devastating. So we went, the two of us, to implore David Selznick to retain George. We had been doing the bazaar scenes. We were both dressed in widow's weeds and all of that, and we had black-bordered handkerchiefs, and we went to see David. We called and said we would like to see him, and he received us, and we pleaded for three-and-a-half hours. We pleaded that he retain George as director. We even took out our handkerchiefs, black-bordered, and we wept into them. Well, he withstood those tears. He had a kind of window seat behind his desk, and he retreated to that window seat. He couldn't go out the window. That stopped him, but how he managed to remain firm, I will never know, and he didn't dismiss us or anything. He was so patient. He listened and listened and listened, and finally, we left and we had not succeeded.

Why did he feel so strongly that Cukor was not the right director for Gone With the Wind?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Olivia de Havilland: Nobody really knows the story, but I think that Clark was rather concerned. Because there was a scene, the bazaar, between him and Scarlett and Melanie, and that scene was written quite differently from the scene that we saw. Quite differently, and Melanie had an extraordinary speech, a long speech, quite remarkable, and the whole incident of the exchange between Clark and Scarlett was somehow secondary to what happened between Scarlett and Melanie before he enters this scene. This is just supposition on my part. It is just a theory I have. He may have thought, "Oh heavens. George is known -- I have never worked with him before, and he may turn this into a woman's picture, because that scene really was between those two women and about the war. And it was only incidental, this little incident. It was very early in the shooting. I sort of think that might have been it, because we went back and we reshot the scene, and that long speech of Melanie's was out, and the whole emphasis of the scene had changed. It was entirely about this little moment with Rhett Butler as the principal character in that scene and the initiator of the scene, and Scarlett and Melanie.

Clark Gable was a big star at the time already, wasn't he?

Olivia de Havilland: Clark Gable was an enormous star. Spencer Tracy, who was a big star himself, named Clark Gable "the King." Both of them were on the Metro [MGM] lot. Huge. He had everything to lose, Clark, and in those days, if you failed in three pictures in a row, you were out, and you never got a job again. That's how tough that world was and how unforgiving. He was, I'm sure, very much concerned about playing Rhett Butler, because the book had been such an enormous hit -- huge, wide readership. Everyone had a concept of Rhett Butler, and his job was to somehow fulfill that concept. If he failed, that would be a blow almost irreparable to his career. So he felt his responsibility very, very deeply, very strongly. He had to protect himself. He had to do it, and in so doing, protect the film. He had worked with Victor Fleming and made a film with him, it had worked out extremely well, and Fleming was highly regarded. So it was Victor who was chosen to replace George Cukor.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had met Howard Hughes just before we started the filming, and you wouldn't think that a man who was so brilliant in another field did make films, but his specialty naturally was planes, flying them. When I met him, he had not terribly long before made this great heroic flight to Moscow, beating all records. I don't think anyone had tried that, and he was a great hero, and that impressed me. He was a rather shy man. He was six-feet-three, three-and-a-half, thin, and had kind of a shy manner. And yet, in a whole community where the men every day played heroes on the screen and didn't do anything heroic in life, here was this man who was a real hero. And that impressed me very much, and his rather shy manner, but you still wouldn't expect that he would have the insight that helped me in a moment of great distress.

We had a dinner engagement, the night after this decision was made to replace George Cukor, and we were not far from the studio. I still had my makeup on, and I told him this terrible thing. I said, "And Victor Fleming is going to replace George." And he said this: "Don't worry. With George and Victor, it is the same talent, only George's is strained through a finer sieve," and that was the most marvelous metaphor. It gave me confidence, and indeed, when my first scene took place with Fleming -- he was a sensitive man -- he called me to one side. It was a scene where Melanie meets Scarlett at the barbecue, early in the film. I had thought their encounter is a kind of social encounter. After the first rehearsal, he drew me aside, and he said the same thing as Jimmy Cagney. He said, "Remember, everything that Melanie says, she means." So I went back and thought of that and did the scene that way. Well, he got to the truth of the scene, just as accurately as George. He was not as detailed a director, but he had that wonderful sensitivity and sense of the core of the scene, the truth of the scene. We were in wonderful hands with him, and I trusted him from then on.

In the script, there is also a reference to how sincere Melanie is. Scarlett says, "Oh, you're just flattering me, Melanie. You don't mean it," and Ashley says, "Melanie means everything she says."

Olivia de Havilland: That's true. Yes.

You have said that Hollywood looked very disparagingly on this huge fuss that was being made filming Gone With the Wind, and assumed it was going to be a big failure.

Olivia de Havilland: Oh yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The whole business of casting, putting it together, taking almost three years, the whole town was bored with the film [Gone With the Wind]. They were so bored with the film, they wished it bad luck, and they all thought it was going to be a big, big flop, a complete disaster, and they were rather pleased at the thought. Well, we just went ahead, quietly working ahead on the lot, six months, retakes after that, and just knew -- I knew we were making a film that was going to have quite a different history from any other film that had ever been made, and it would endure. And by heaven, it has, has it not?

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

So those of you who were on the set believed in what you were doing.

Olivia de Havilland: Yes, we did.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The unifying factor was, of course, David Selznick. Change of direction with all directors. We also had Sam Wood, because Victor Fleming fell ill. He had kind of a nervous breakdown after about four weeks of shooting, and Sam Wood came on the set to replace him. And eventually, when Victor was ready to come back, because by this time we were so far behind, David did something amazing. He kept both of them, so that you would start in the morning and you would film with Victor, change your costume, go to another stage, and continue in the afternoon a different scene with Sam Wood. Now that is quite a strange practice!

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