Olivia de Havilland Interview (page: 5 / 9) Legendary Leading Lady	Print Interview

The Snake Pit was a difficult subject for a film in 1948, wasn't it? Mental illness was very rarely touched on in movies at that time.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Olivia de Havilland: I think it was the first serious study of mental illness of a character -- serious study. And I, of course, saw all the experiences that Virginia Cunningham endured. I saw [electric] shock. It was very moving, because when the body under shock, it rises like this, and there is terrible danger, that it will slide off the table when it comes back, and bones can be broken. The particular hospital, it was a California hospital that I visited. Something so touching happened. They had a team of patients who were undergoing shock treatment help the patient who had been assigned that therapy for a certain day, and one would hold this shoulder, another would hold the other. All of them having been through shock, and still, still programmed for that, the hips, the knees, and the ankles, and I saw the body rise. They held on, and of course, nothing happened. No injury ensued to the patient. I saw her afterwards and then several days later, and the whole experience was altogether extraordinary.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

You were nominated for an Oscar for that role.

Olivia de Havilland: Yes. Another nomination. I was so pleased about that.

After the De Havilland decision, your roles did change rather quickly, didn't they? You got more in-depth roles.

Olivia de Havilland: Oh, right away. It was the most thrilling thing. Paramount came forth with To Each His Own right away, Universal with The Dark Mirror. To Each His Own was just what I wanted to do, interpreting the life of a girl of 16 straight through to the age of 45 when she is in London and is a successful business woman during the war. A marvelous story, very well told, beautifully done. The Dark Mirror was extraordinary too as an assignment. Twins, one psychotic, the other normal. I did a lot of research for that too, of course.

In To Each His Own, how did you differentiate between the young Josephine Norris and the 45-year-old woman? Did you behave differently? Were you lighted differently? How did that work?

Olivia de Havilland: We tried to shoot in sequence, and I was quite thin then. I had gone on a diet and lost a lot of weight, and that was quite suitable for the 16-year-old Jody Norris, and the costumes helped. I loved studying the hairstyles, working out the hairstyles according to period with the hairdresser. There was a very good hairdresser, a good makeup man too, at Paramount, and of course, Edith Head did a superb job with the costumes. I tried to think of everything that could help me. I thought of cologne also. What scents will be helpful in building the character? There was one called Apple Blossom, and I thought for the very first scenes of Jody, that would just be perfect. When she's slightly older, but still in the village, Lilac. So I found colognes to express the character's age and environment and experience. Then I wanted to know what I should use for Jody as she becomes rather successful and she's wearing a gown, smoking cigarettes. I asked a Frenchwoman what was the fashion in that particular year, and she said, "Chipre, Chipre." I don't know what that means in French, but I then asked for "Chipre, Chipre," and I got an approximation to it. For another scene I chose Chanel No. 5. I thought that was appropriate. Everything helps, you know, everything.

In that movie, you play a young woman who becomes an unwed mother and then is separated from her child for a great period of time, which is so agonizing. You yourself had not yet become a mother and had not yet gone through these emotions. How were you able to portray those characteristics without having experienced those things in life?

Olivia de Havilland: I think you have to have a very responsive nature. Think about anyone who reads a book. You visualize the characters. You become one with each of the characters. For a moment, through reading a book, you have the life experience of the character you are reading about. I fancy that reading gives you all of these extraordinary experiences that are helpful in understanding people. And that's true for a person without an acting talent. For an acting talent, it is a very developing thing.

Does it take empathy?

Olivia de Havilland: It takes empathy. If you are going to do a good job, you have to empathize with a character, either instinctively and through feeling, or intellectually. Preferably in both ways, but empathy is very much involved, of course.

You won your second Oscar for your performance as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. How did you come at that role of this terribly shy young woman who changes so?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Olivia de Havilland: I saw her in the play, wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller, a brilliant performance, but very stylized. It was an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, as you know. And I thought, "I see another way to play Catherine," because stylization will not work on film. It would be artificial. I just knew, at the end of the second act, I had to play Catherine. I had to do it, and I was, of course, by now, completely independent and could make my own decisions to take my own initiatives. So, I thought of the directors who would have a particular feel for this material and whom I admired. Two of them I had worked with, and the third I had not worked with. The first two were caught up in other commitments and were not free. The third one had just founded, together with two other directors -- Capra and George Stevens -- his own independent film company, Liberty Films at Paramount, and that man was Willie Wyler. So my agent persuaded him to say nothing to anyone, to get on the train, go to New York, see The Heiress, and he, of course, was looking for material. It was quite wonderful. Never will forget the night I knew he had arrived, the day he arrived in New York, and I knew he would go straight to the theater to see the play, and he had promised to call me afterwards. Well, I waited for that phone call, and I waited, and it came, and he said, "I've seen it. I like it. Let's do it."

[ Key to Success ] Vision

And, we did.

The chill between your character, Catherine Sloper, and her father is very powerful. It's a very strong feeling when one is watching the film. I gather that on the set, there was a bit of a chill as well with the actor who played your father.

Olivia de Havilland: Ralph Richardson was an extremely distinguished and gifted English artist. He was quite cool to me, and frightfully English, really. Really a wonderful artist, revered to this day in the profession, but he would do rather naughty things. He was a glove flapper. That is a British theater trick. There was one scene with the two of us, it was an intimate scene and it was very important that Catherine and all her feelings captured the audience's attention fully. Ralph Richardson? The father? Glove flapping. This distracted me in rehearsals terribly, just as an actress, but what I was worried about was Catherine. The attention of the audience had to be on her without a distraction like that. Willie was very impressed by Ralph. I went to him and I asked him, "What about that glove flapping?" He said, "Don't worry. I've framed it so the gloves are out." I still had to put up with the terrible distraction, but it didn't matter. I knew that Catherine was protected.

Why didn't Wyler make him stop? Do you think he wanted you to feel insecure?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Olivia de Havilland: I often wonder, because Willie was really quite rude to me on the set, in that he would sit with Ralph. They would sit together, engage him in conversation, ignore me completely as we were waiting for a scene to be lit, and I would be sitting there like Cinderella in my little chair, nobody speaking to me. None of the two gentlemen speaking, no one paying any attention to me at all, and it is entirely possible that Willie did that deliberately to make me feel sort of inadequate and sort of uninteresting and well, certainly not the focus of attention, I'll tell you that.

Very much the way the character of Catherine feels in her own home.

Olivia de Havilland: He may have done that quite deliberately. I hadn't thought about it until this question came up.

What was Montgomery Clift like to work with?

Olivia de Havilland: Naughty. It was his second picture. Red River had not yet been released, but people had seen it and knew he was marvelous in it. So he came to play Morris Townsend in The Heiress. He had a Polish lady friend who was apparently a highly respected coach, a theater coach, a very talented woman, and she would be in back of the stage. He would work out every one of his scenes with the Polish lady. I knew that when he was working with me, he wasn't working with me at all. He was working with the Polish woman in our scenes together. It was most peculiar, but I decided I've got to make use of this in some fashion, and I managed psychologically to do that, because in fact, the character of Morris Townsend really is giving a performance. So I was able to get around that psychologically, but when we would finish a scene, he would look up to see whether she nodded. If she didn't, he would say, "Can we do the scene again?" This wasn't fun for me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It wasn't fun for anyone, and it certainly wasn't for William Wyler, a very distinguished man, as the director of the film. One day, we came on the set. It was a long and difficult scene, and he said, "I don't know what this scene is all about. I want you to show me. Just get up there. Start there with your scripts, and just show me what this scene is all about." Well, it was frightful. There we were stumbling along, and we exchange, say, ten lines, and he would say, "Stop. I want you to go back to the beginning. Keep this little exchanges you made, say, with the third exchange of lines. Leave everything else out. Do something different. I don't care what you do, as long as it's different, but keep just that." So we would do that, and then he would say, "Stop. Keep the first exchange. Then I want you to keep the sixth exchange. Drop everything else. Start again." We did that for four hours, and I think Montie Clift realized that perhaps he should kind of work things out with William Wyler and Miss De Havilland.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

And not the Polish woman?

Olivia de Havilland: But she was still about, I believe, nonetheless. That was a unique experience.

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