Olivia Mary de Havilland (born July 1, 1916) is an Oscar-winning Japanese-born American film actress.

Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan, and is the elder daughter of Walter de Havilland, a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and the former Lilian Augusta Ruse, an actress known by her stage name of Lilian (or Lillian) Fontaine, who married in 1914. Her father was the half-brother of the late Charles de Havilland, who was the father of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, the famous aviation pioneer (who died in 1946). Her younger sister is the actress Joan Fontaine (also born in Tokyo, on October 22, 1917), from whom she has been famously estranged for many decades, not speaking at all since 1975.

De Havilland's family moved from Tokyo when she was two years old, settling in Saratoga, California. She attended school at Los Gatos High School and at the Notre Dame Convent Catholic girls' school in Belmont, California. Subsequently, an acting award at Los Gatos is named after her.

De Havilland's career began co-starring with Joe E. Brown in Alibi Ike in 1935. She appeared as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, her first stage production, at the Hollywood Bowl. The stage production was later turned into a 1935 movie with the same cast. De Havilland played opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films as Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and as Maid Marian to Flynn's Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). She played Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939) and received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance. Out of the four stars of Gone with the Wind (the others being Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard), she is the only one who is still alive. Ironically, her character was the only of the four who died in the film.

In 1941, Olivia became a naturalized citizen of the United States. De Havilland and her sister were each nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1942. Fontaine won first for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) over de Havilland's nomination for Hold Back the Dawn (1941).

Biographer Charles Higham has described the events of the awards ceremony, stating that as Fontaine stepped forward to collect her award, she had pointedly rejected de Havilland's attempts at congratulating her and that de Havilland was both offended and embarrassed by her behavior. Several years later, de Havilland would return the favor and brush by Fontaine, waiting with her hand extended, because Olivia had allegedly taken offense at a comment Joan made about Olivia's then-husband. He records that the sisters always had an uneasy relationship, even since early childhood, when Olivia would rip up the clothes Joan had to wear as hand-me-downs, forcing Joan to sew them back together. Both sisters have refused to comment, but Higham has stated that the above described event in 1942 was the final straw for what would become a lifelong feud, but this is debatable, given de Haviland's later retaliation, and also the events of 1975, which were at least as notable milestones as the incident Higham describes from 1942. The sisters finally ceased to speak at all in 1975, because, according to Fontaine, de Havilland had not invited her to a memorial service for their late mother, Lilian de Havilland, who had recently died, although Olivia claims she told Joan and Joan brushed her off saying she was too busy to attend. The truth is hard to get when one is faced with two different versions of the same event (and probably many other events as well).

By this time, de Havilland was becoming increasingly frustrated by the roles being assigned to her. She felt that she had proven herself to be capable of playing more than the demure ingenues and damsels in distress that were quickly typecasting her, and began to reject scripts that offered her this type of role. The law allowed for studios to suspend contract players for rejecting a role and the period of suspension to be added to the contract period. In theory this allowed a studio to maintain indefinite control over an uncooperative contractee. Most accepted this situation, while a few tried to change the system; Bette Davis had mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against Warner Bros in the 1930s. De Havilland mounted a lawsuit in the 1940s and was successful, thereby reducing the power of the studios and extending greater creative freedom to the performers. The decision was one of the most significant and far reaching legal rulings until that time in Hollywood. Her courage in mounting such a challenge, and her subsequent victory, won her the respect and admiration of her peers. The court's rulling came to be known, and is still known to this day as the de Havilland law.

The quality and variety of her roles began to improve. She won Best Actress Academy Awards for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), and was also widely praised for her Academy Award nominated performance in The Snake Pit (1948). This was one of the earliest films to attempt a realistic portrayal of mental illness, and de Havilland was lauded for her willingness to play a role that was completely devoid of glamour and that confronted such controversial subject matter.

De Havilland appeared sporadically in films after the 1950s and attributed this partly to the growing permissiveness of Hollywood films of the period. She was reported to have declined the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, citing the unsavoury nature of some elements of the script and saying there were certain lines she could not allow herself to speak. The role eventually went to her former Gone with the Wind co-star, Vivien Leigh, who won her second Academy Award for her role. De Havilland continued acting until the 1980s.

De Havilland had a relationship with John Huston in the early 1940s. Afterward, she married and divorced novelist Marcus Goodrich between 1946 and 1953. They had a son, Benjamin, who died of complications from Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1991. She later married Pierre Galante from 1955 to 1979, producing a daughter, Giselle, in 1956. When de Havilland and Galante divorced they remained on good terms, and she nursed him through his final illness in Paris, which was the stated reason for her absence from the star-studded 70th Anniversary of the Oscars in 1998 where former winners attended and were shown seated, in alphabetical order (from Anne Bancroft to Teresa Wright) and enjoyed the goodwill of the suddenly nostalgic audience. Fontaine was not present, either. She was good friends with frequent co-star, the late Bette Davis, and also with Gloria Stuart, the newly rediscovered (in her 80s) ingenue of Titanic (1997 film).

A resident of Paris since the 1950s, de Havilland lives in retirement and makes appearances rarely. She is reported to be working on an autobiography. One of her most recent public appearances was as a presenter at the 75th Annual Academy Awards in 2003. In 2004, Turner Classic Movies put together a retrospective piece called Melanie Remembers in which de Havilland was interviewed for the 65th anniversary of Gone with the Wind's original release. 88 years old, de Havilland remembered every detail of her casting (she was in a contract with Warner Bros, and at first they refused to let her play Melanie for David O. Selznick) as well as filming (Leigh could go immediately from break to filming and fall into her Scarlett O'Hara part, while Olivia needed 20 minutes to focus to get back into Melanie.) The documentary lasted for a little under 40 minutes and can be seen on the Gone with the Wind four-disc special collector's edition.

Dutch poet J.A. Deelder wrote an epic poem about his childhood called Portret van Olivia de Havilland (Portrait of Olivia de Havilland).