Word: havilland
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...turns the corner, seems suspiciously quick, easy and well-timed for a happy ending (in reality, she might very likely suffer a relapse). But with all its minor faults, The Snake Pit is an important motion picture. One of its notable achievements is that it establishes Olivia de Havilland not so much as a star, a dubious title she already held, but as an actress...
...Actress. The De Havilland performance is happily free of the traditional weeping and gnashing of teeth which most actors seem to relish in "mad" parts. Her Virginia is not thrashing about in darkness, but is blinded and bewildered by too much light. What gives her bewilderment a special quality is the firm, almost prim, dignity which she sustains even in the animal moments of Virginia's madness. She is excellent in the little scenes of rebellion-carefully preserved from the novel-with which Virginia tries to shake off her fate. And she can speak lines of questionable worth with...
Although she made her first movie 14 years ago, and has since done some skilled acting (Gone With the Wind, Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own-which won her the Academy Award in 1947), few people in or out of Hollywood know very much about Olivia de Havilland. "Livvie" has long been the subject of much amateur psychoanalysis among her friends and acquaintances...
Second Witch & Violet. Olivia's own case history would probably begin with her father. Walter de Havilland was a British patent attorney living in Tokyo, where Olivia was born in 1916. When she was about eight, an event occurred which -as any cocktail party psychoanalyst knows-was enough to give her complexes to last a lifetime. Her father (in the words of wife Lilian, he "spoke like God but behaved like the devil") decided to leave his wife and marry the De Havillands' Japanese maid. Mrs. de Havilland had already taken Olivia and her younger sister Joan...
...this domestic upheaval, Mrs. de Havilland-Fontaine had a date with her bridge club. The ladies were so moved by the story of young Olivia's plight that they raised $200 to help her out. Olivia boarded with a respectable lady and went on triumphantly as Violet. Ever since, except for a brief spell of discouragement when she thought of becoming a speech teacher, Olivia has pursued her profession with the same energy and bounce that led her high-school class to predict that she would become a "circus queen...