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Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland turned 102 today. I like that someone who was in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood is still alive.



Coloristically, one of the most striking films ever made, and also sonically--the whip/whoosh-and-culminating-echoing-zing of those arrows is one of the all-time great sounds of cinema. Havilland did a lot more, of course. Her first film was a baseball vehicle, Alibi Ike, in 1935, which took its basis from a Ring Lardner short story. The best baseball fiction writer we have had, in my view.


She teamed with Errol Flynn a few years before Robin Hood in Captain Blood, an excellent pirate pic with plenty of blood and swash.



She's funny in The Male Animal (1942), plenty for Robert Mitchum to handle in Not as a Stranger (1955), but her best role might be in 1948's The Snake Pit, in which she plays a woman who awakens in an insane asylum, unsure how she got there, unable to leave.



She plays with Basil Rathbone (who would take on the role of Sherlock Holmes the next year, perhaps only being bettered in it by Jeremy Brett) at the start of this clip, from The Adventures of Robin Hood.



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