When she was 93, Olivia de Havilland (obituary, 28 July) kindly wrote to me about Gone With the Wind for a book I was researching.
Some weeks into filming, the producer, David O Selznick, decided to replace the director George Cukor with Victor Fleming. “Vivien [Leigh] and I stormed into David’s office in our widows’ costumes one day to beg him to reverse his decision. During this crisis, Howard Hughes took me out to dinner near the studio and assuaged my fears by saying: ‘With George and Victor, it’s the same talent, only George’s is strained through a finer sieve.’”
She found this to be true: Fleming’s direction was much less detailed than Cukor’s, but was nonetheless perceptive.
