The petite woman with an elegant swoop of white hair and a neat dash of red lipstick stands to greet her visitor with a hug. "Good evening!" Olivia de Havilland says, leaning in for a Continental two-cheek kiss. It is early January in Paris, and the actress has invited a journalist over for champagne and a chat. She is, of course, impeccably dressed in an embroidered black velvet gown and gold Chanel ballet flats, a strand of pearls knotted chicly at her chest.
The stately town house that has been de Havilland's home for the past 58 years is undergoing repairs, so she receives her guest in her temporary quarters: a suite in an exclusive hotel that is located, quite fittingly for this grande dame of the silver screen, in a 19th-century château.
An assistant pours bubbly into two flutes. "What are we toasting?" de Havilland asks, raising her glass.
How about the hostess herself?
At 98, Olivia de Havilland is the last great star of Hollywood's golden age, a woman who began her career during the rise of Technicolor in 1935, formed one of the most indelible screen couples of all time with Errol Flynn, and went on to work with James Cagney, Rita Hayworth, Montgomery Clift, Bette Davis, Richard Burton, Clark Gable, and Vivien Leigh. With her deep brown doe eyes and apple-cheeked smile, the two-time Best Actress winner excelled at playing heroines whose demure bearing belied a feisty core. The most famous of these great ladies was Melanie Hamilton, the tenderhearted foil to Leigh's scheming Scarlett O'Hara in 1939's Gone With the Wind. Based on Margaret Mitchell's best-seller, the beloved epic has sold more tickets in its lifetime than any other film. And 75 years ago it cleaned up at the Academy Awards, winning eight of its 13 nominations.
Having outlived all of her costars (as well as the movie's mad-genius producer, David O. Selznick, and the three directors he hired to steer the massive ship), de Havilland has been GWTW's principal spokesperson for almost five decades, the sole bearer of the Tara torch. It's a privilege she calls "rather wonderful," as her affection for the film is genuine and deep. She's seen GWTW "about 30 times," she says, and still enjoys watching it for the emotional jolt it brings as she reconnects with those costars-Gable, Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Leslie Howard-who have long since passed on.
"Luckily, it does not make me melancholy," she says via email a few days after our meeting. (Though an expert raconteuse, she's conscientious about facts-"I want to be a font of truth"-and will discuss the finer points of her career only in writing.) "Instead, when I see them vibrantly alive on screen, I experience a kind of reunion with them, a joyful one."