As the world knows: Today, Olivia de Havilland passed gently into the night of natural causes in her residence in Paris, France.
She was 104 years old. Here is a backgrounder on her life and career.
Her sister Joan Fontaine, also a Hollywood big name, died at age 96. Family genes structured for longevity.
The Olivia de Havilland brand is most associated with her dramatic performances. They include the now-controversial "Gone with the Wind." Along the way, she picked up two Academy Awards.
But her legacy in the legal sector is quite different.
She was a trailblazer in using the law to reduce the power of Hollywood studios. Yes, she instituted a kind of power outage.
In 1943, she filed a lawsuit against Warner Brothers. It was confining her to ingenue roles. No fool, she got it that she wouldn't be an ingenue forever. Warner's management of her was keeping her career on a short runway.
In 1944, the court ruled that after seven years - calendar ones - the contract was fulfilled. That freed the actress to seek out roles at other studios.
Of course, Warner Brothers tried to blackball her in the industry. Obviously that didn't have the career-killing results Warner expected. Her career, though, like most in Hollywood, had its ups and downs. The universe wasn't always smiling on her.
In this time of renamings, a law school should take on the new moniker of "The Olivia de Havilland School of Game-Changing Law."
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