LYCOS RETRIEVER
Olivia De Havilland: Joan Fontaine
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Olivia Mary de Havilland was born to a British patent attorney and his wife on July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan. Her sister, Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old and moved with the remaining family to Los Angeles, California. After graduating from high school, where she fell prey to the acting bug, Olivia enrolled in Mills College in Oakland. It was while she was at Mills that she participated in the school play, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and was spotted by Max Reinhardt. She so impressed Reinhardt that he picked her up for both his stage version and, later, the Warner Bros.
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Olivia Mary de Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan on July 1, 1916 of a British patent attorney and his actress wife. Her sister, Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, (Joan Fontaine), was born in October, 1917. The sisters have had a long-standing feud. While attending high school in California, she became interested in acting and played Hermia in an amateur production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was spotted by director Max Reinhardt who cast her in his professional production of Midsummer at the Hollywood Bowl and she then played Hermia in the movie version of Midsummer. She was signed to a long-term contract by Warner Brothers.
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Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1, 1916) is a two-time Academy Award-winning film actress. Early life De Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan, and is the elder daughter of Walter de Havilland, a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and the former Lilian Augusta Ruse, an actress known by her stage name of Lilian Fontaine, whom he married in 1914. Her father was the half-brother of the late Charles de Havilland, who was the father of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, the famous aviation pioneer (who died in 1965). Her younger sister is the actress Joan Fontaine (... born in Tokyo, on October 22,
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An icon of Hollywood's golden age, Olivia de Havilland was born July 1, 1916, in Tokyo to a British patent attorney and his wife. When she was 3, her parents divorced, and her mother moved Olivia and her sister (future actress Joan Fontaine) to California. Stage director Max Reinhardt discovered her there and cast her in his acclaimed 1935 film A Midsummer Night's Dream. Soon, she scored another hit as Errol Flynn's ladylove in Captain Blood; they would co-star seven more times.
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Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan to English parents. Her father, Walter, headed a firm of patent attorneys; her mother, Lilian, a trained singer and actress, was active in the theatrical life of the city's small English community. Her parents separated when she was only two years old, and along with her younger sister, Joan, she was taken by her mother to the United States, where they settled in Saratoga, California, then a small village outside of San José.
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After completing The Heiress, de Havilland spent several years on Broadway, cutting down her subsequent film appearances to approximately one per year. In 1955, she moved to France with her second husband, Paris Match editor Pierre Galante; she later recalled her Paris years with the semiautobiographical Every Frenchman Has One. Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965), in which she replaced Joan Crawford. During the next decade, she appeared in a number of TV productions and in such all-star film efforts as Airport '77 (1977) and The Swarm (1978). After a number of TV appearances (if not always starring roles) in the '80s, de Havilland once more found herself in the limelight in 1989, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Gone With the Wind. As one of the only surviving stars from this film, she was much sought after for interviews and reminiscences, but graciously refused almost every request.
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