Hollywood's sweetheart: Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland, a star of Hollywood's golden age, lives in Paris in a tall townhouse near the Bois de Boulogne. It is snowing when I arrive and I am so cold I can barely speak. The maid shows me into a drawing room where, outlined against a blazing fire, Miss de Havilland stands with welcoming arms outstretched. She is small in stature but her charm is enormous, overwhelming. It is exactly like being greeted by the character she created, Melanie in

Meeting Miss de Havilland restores one's faith in film stars. So many up-and-coming starlets barely deign to give you the time of day, but this double-Oscar-winner says sweetly, 'You can ask me anything you like. Anything!' Over tea and cakes (smart little almond financiers served by her maid) she tells me her life story with aplomb – '...So I said to our future president, John F Kennedy, "I'm sorry, I can't join you for dinner, I'm studying my lines tonight"' – often breaking into high, owlish hoots of unexpectedly wicked laughter.

It is hard, very hard, to believe she is 93. Only the glorious vintage of her gossip gives it away. 'I saw Norma Shearer dancing with Leslie Howard and I thought, "I wonder what her husband thinks about that"' Sometimes she confides regret: 'For two weeks after I lost out on that Oscar, I didn't believe in God' and briefly, when I ask whether she might one day be reconciled with her sister, the actress Joan Fontaine, she shows the pain of an ongoing family feud. 'Better not,' she says, smiling through gritted teeth. 'Better not.'

When Bryan Adams photographed Olivia for ES in Paris, she wore a chiffon gown first designed for her in the 1950s by legendary Hollywood costumier Edith Head, and latterly copied and refitted for her to wear to the Oscars in 2003. She tells me she had three fitting sessions. To enhance the dress's grandeur? 'No,' she says, voice quavering with laughter. 'To more effectively disguise my amplitude. Ah, ha ha.' Shooting outside in winter, the crew were impressed by her resolute cheerfulness. 'I don't feel the cold,' she announced staunchly. 'It's my British blood!'

Although she has never lived in Britain, her father, Walter, was from Guernsey and her mother, Lillian, from Reading, so Olivia maintains a patriotic attitude and an old-world Anglo-American accent. Olivia was born first, and Joan just over a year later, in Tokyo, where their father practised patent law. Their parents divorced when the girls were toddlers and their mother set up home – with a stepfather, George Fontaine, the inspiration for Joan's stage name – in Saratoga, California.

Olivia recalls how her drama teacher, Miss Dorothea Johnston, won 'much celebrity' impersonating a Sioux tribeswoman. 'She found herself an authentic Indian drum and got someone to make her a headdress – I think it had a feather or two – and would give song and dance recitals after dinner. Of course she was pure Scot but that didn't stop her.' This characterful woman directed Olivia in her first lead role, Alice in Wonderland ('I was 16 and I received the nicest review of my life'), and helped her to get into a student production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Olivia played Puck. 'The theatre was a glade of sycamore trees. The audience sat on a platform that spanned a stream and we gave three performances under a full moon.'

One such fateful night, the man who would make her a star was in the audience; the revered Austrian émigré director, Max Reinhardt. 'He was always Herr Doktor Professor to me. There was no one who could touch him for prestige and renown. I was very attached to him and I think he was attached to me because he would say in his German accent every time he saw me, "You are my discovering!"' He cast her – this time in the role of Hermia – in his classic 1935 Warner Brothers movie of A Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring James Cagney as Bottom, with Felix Mendelssohn's music arranged by Erich Korngold. Olivia had hit the big time at only 17.

Looking back, what advice would she offer herself? 'Oh, I wouldn't dare!' Was she a headstrong girl? 'Very. Highly motivated, and highly principled. And whatever mistakes I had to make, I had to make them.' She tried to turn down a Warner Brothers contract ('I said, "It isn't enough money"'), until Reinhardt forced her hand. On the set of A Midsummer Night's Dream she made friends with Mickey Rooney, who played a hyperactive Puck. 'When we were rehearsing he would come and sit by me on a banquette, and he was so exhausted he would fall asleep and give me his playbook so I could wake him up nine lines before he was needed.' He was not all he seemed, however. 'He claimed to be nine years old and he was such a tiny freckled boy you could believe it, but now I've studied the dates he was evidently in his early teens,' she says.

She wasn't to cross paths with Rooney again until the Oscars in 2003, almost 70 years later. 'I watched him coming in, saying, "Hiya, hiya" to everyone – and then he looked over and saw me, and burst into tears and threw his arms around my waist and started reciting Shakespeare, tears streaming down his face.' All Olivia can remember from the play is a line about Hermia, delivered by Helena in that classic girl-fight scene: 'She was a vixen when she went to school and though she be but little, she is fierce.'

There was always trouble between Olivia and her sister, according to Joan's autobiography, a monument to self-pity called No Bed of Roses (dubbed by her ex-husband, the actor and producer William Dozier, 'No Shred of Truth'). Joan describes how she came back from a year in Japan with their father to find Olivia's career had taken off, making the younger sister, as she puts it, 'a serviteur'. Referring to herself in the third person, she writes: 'Joan made a passable cook, housekeeper, go-for and chauffeur for the rented Ford' Feeling her own acting aspirations were impeded by Olivia's success and burning with jealousy at Olivia's closeness to their mother, Joan suffered what might be called a Cinderella complex. Olivia has never succumbed to the temptation to tell her side of the story, although she does, in passing, mention 'my sibling' with a certain icy sibilance different to her usual tone: 'My sibling had already established her own life by that time...'

The premiere of A Midsummer Night's Dream was a glittering affair held at news-paper magnate William Randolph Hearst's beach house in Santa Monica. Olivia went with her mother and two English gentlemen friends. 'It was white tie, and to see all those great stars, well. I was just 19 and from my perspective it could never be matched.' That was where she was shocked to see the silent movie goddess Norma Shearer dancing with her Romeo and Juliet co-star, the English actor Leslie Howard, even though she was married to the head of MGM, Irving Thalberg. Were they more innocent times? She demurs from 'innocent', wincing to find the right word but settling for 'different' times.

She grew up in a black-and-white world, and remembers the advent of the strange new medium of
Technicolor. 'The great question at the studio was, "Will she photograph well in colour?" So I had to take the test with Technicolor make-up, which was deadly. Literally; very pale with almost grey lips. Because Technicolor was then three colour bands, it was very sensitive to red, you see, so you'd look flushed with a madly
brilliant mouth – you had to have unreal
make-up to create a normal effect on screen.'

Olivia's account of meeting her long-term on-screen partner Errol Flynn is adorably demure. 'When I arrived they said, "Mr Flynn is over there" and I looked at him and I thought, "Oh. Oh."' She shuts her eyes and lays a hand on the breast of her pristine white blouse. '"Oh." And then I took my place and said, "How do you do?"' After that she saw him in the canteen but didn't dare go and sit by him. 'Of course, I had to hide my feelings.' She knew he was involved with someone else – the actress Lili Damita, who was, in fact, his wife, although in another piece of studio obfuscation, that was never made clear at the time.

Being a nice girl, Olivia insisted his swash was firmly buckled while they made eight films including Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Charge of the Light Brigade, which was when 'he did a very devilish thing. He put a dead snake in my pantaloons. It fell out on the floor and appeared to wriggle and I went tearing out of my little canvas dressing room wearing a hoop skirt, just the framework, and I ran down the hillside and into a lake and up to the hips, shrieking. I thought I heard someone giggling behind a bush. Two fellas – Flynn and David Niven. Not really endearing.' A snake – how very Freudian, I remark. 'Yes, but a dead snake,' she replies, quick as a flash. 'I don't quite understand the message. Ah ha, ha ha ha!' Still fascinated by him, Olivia has been rereading Flynn's autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, and 'putting paper clips' on the 'self-revealing or contradictory' passages. In this book, published posthumously, he made it clear he was always smitten with her. 'Yes, he comes right out with it,' she says sadly.

By this time, she felt trapped by the Warner Brothers contract and, yearning to pick and choose her films, mounted a lawsuit against them, achieving a landmark ruling still known as the De Havilland Law. Freedom meant more stretching roles, such as both the good and bad twin in The Dark Mirror (1946) and the disturbed Sylvia Plath-like figure at the centre of The Snake Pit (1948). She researched these by speaking to psychiatrists and visiting asylums. Her total professionalism still shows when she tells me cheerfully about the time the studio asked her to lose 9lb – in 18 days. 'I was quite thin and I didn't have to worry until I had my appendix out and a mysterious metabolic change occurred. The producer called me and said, "We've discussed it, you have to lose the weight – here's the Harper's Bazaar diet." It involved drinking just coffee in the morning. Well, usually I drank tea and had a good breakfast, but I stuck to it. I had to stay in bed, mainly because otherwise I might just go out and be disagreeable to people.'

One day in 1945, John F Kennedy came to tea at her house in Stone Canyon, Bel Air, wearing naval uniform. 'He was quite silent; his friend did most of the talking. He just sat there, those great big eyes staring. Then, when it was time for them to leave, we walked into the hallway and he very decisively opened the door – and it was a closet, and all my old boxes of summer hats and tennis rackets fell on his head.' Later he called her up. 'He said, "This is Jack, I was at your house – have dinner with me." That's the way a future president does it.' She turned him down, saying she was taking dinner in bed while studying her script, but she did allow herself to be persuaded to go out to dinner with a great friend, 'a rotund fellow with a little fringe of white hair'. Into Romanoff's restaurant they walked, and who should they see but 'the lovely warrior himself'? That was the end of that affair.

One day she answered the telephone to Howard Hughes. Their engagement had been erroneously announced in Louella Parsons's gossip column, and he said, 'I understand we're engaged. Don't you think we ought to meet?' They went out for dinner 'occasionally'. Was it love or friendship? 'Hmm. Mixed. His manner was diffident and shy, which is very appealing on the part of a world hero and master aviator.' She is marvellously good at telling these stories, but I do wonder if they function as an anecdotal shield, protecting the deeper reaches of her heart, such as the affair with John Huston (who gave her an Airedale terrier named Shadrach), and the two marriages that failed, first to the novelist Marcus Goodrich, with whom she had a son, Benjamin, and then to the editor of Paris Match, Pierre Galante, who was the reason she moved to Paris. They had a daughter, Gisele, born when Olivia was 40.

She is at ease in French, conversing with the maid, who has come over and whispered a prompt in her ear. 'Oh yes!' she says and turns to ask me, 'Would you like to see my Oscars?' There is only one answer to that. Up the stairs, which are carpeted in deep red, a drawing room gives on to a little study full of awards, including two Oscars, now more tarnished bronze than yellow gold, but still singing with triumph. I only realise how much they mean to her when she tells me how it felt to lose out to Hattie McDaniel in the Best Supporting Actress category for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind in 1940. 'Huge disappointment, on two levels. I never said a word about this at the time, but of course, I had star billing. I was not "supporting" at all. Nooo. But oh, David [O Selznick, the film's producer] was so shrewd about how to manipulate situations to achieve the desired outcome. It was imperative that Vivien [Leigh] win that award. Now if many people were fond of Melanie and would possibly have voted for her, Melanie would have taken away votes from Scarlett So they reduced
me to a category that was not my category.'

When she found out she hadn't won even that: 'Luckily I had a British upbringing. Not a flicker crossed my face. I held on to this equanimity, which was purely a mask, right through the dinner and the presentations: it was just a little dinner then, a cosy, family affair, in a sense. When it was over, one tear started to run down my cheek and Irene Selznick [wife of David, and daughter of Louis B Mayer] saw it and she was marvellous and she took me into the kitchen of the hotel where there was a huge cauldron of soup – bouillon – and I wept, copiously, I'm afraid, into the cauldron, and my tears were just as hot.' Revealing the fierce ambition in her, the story is nevertheless delivered with a just-perceptible twinkle. 'Then I woke up one morning and thought, "Oh, Hattie won it for supporting actress, there is a God after all. And she was the first black to win
an Oscar, what a wonderful world, and a wonderful God!"'

Paired against each other for Best Actress in 1942, her sister Joan won for Hitchcock's Suspicion, and Olivia lost out again for Hold Back the Dawn. According to legend (alas, footage does not exist), Joan refused to accept Olivia's congratulations. 'I felt Olivia would spring across the table and grab me by the hair,' wrote Joan in her autobiography, adding, 'Actually, Olivia took the situation very graciously.' Of course she did. Olivia went on to win in 1947, for To Each His Own, and in 1950 for The Heiress (a wonderful adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square) but when Joan tried to congratulate her – well, a photograph shows Olivia's discomfort. 'There was an unfortunate situation backstage,' agrees Olivia guardedly. 'An unhappy situation.'