Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.
Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of “Gone With the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter, challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system.
De Havilland was among the last of the top screen performers from the studio era, and the last surviving lead from “Gone With the Wind,” an irony, she once noted, since the fragile, self-sacrificing Melanie Wilkes was the only major character to die in the film.
She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of a British patent attorney. Her parents separated when she was 3, and her mother brought her and her younger sister Joan to Saratoga, California.
De Havilland’s own two marriages, to Marcus Goodrich and Pierre Galante, ended in divorce.
She had lived in Paris since 1953.
In her interview with the AP at her luxurious Paris residence in 2016, as she celebrated her 100th birthday, she said she moved to the City of Light “at the insistence” of Galante, her late French former husband, and found no reason to return to the US.
According to BBC, De Havilland's career spanned more than 50 years and almost 50 feature films. The film earned her one of her five Oscar nominations.