A lifetime is a fairly short span, the wise agree. And a clear-eyed understanding that the significance of individuals really does not “amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world” is shared not just by the fans of the last scene of Casablanca. The mature thing is to soberly accept our time on Earth is fleeting and that all our efforts will soon be forgotten.
Yet occasionally somebody manages to buck the trend. Olivia de Havilland, renowned Hollywood beauty and double Oscar winner, was 100 years old on Friday and somehow appears to have quietly straddled the ages.
Usually, when it comes to the lives of well-known personalities – politicians, performers or sports stars – our habit of consigning them to a particular era means we can keep up our faith in the brevity of human existence. So Henry Kissinger is the 1960s, Björn Borg is the 1970s and Simon Le Bon is the 1980s.
These three celebrated names are kept in their own time-limited box, despite the fact they are still going strong. History will eventually preserve each of them to some degree or other, but we seem to want neatly to tie up their stories and then move on.
It is both wonderful and pleasantly muddling then to be reminded that de Havilland, a film star who by rights belongs way back in a Technicolor world, wrapped in the arms of either Errol Flynn or Leslie Howard, is alive and well and comfortably set up in a Paris hotel suite.
Those melting brown eyes, that quizzical brow and the soft, spherical face that made her feisty Maid Marian so beguiling in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and her Melanie Hamilton so meekly decorative in Gone With the Wind, is still observing global events in 2016, just like the rest of us. “I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand,” she said recently.
So the woman who played opposite James Cagney, the woman who fought the studio mogul Jack Warner of Warner Bros and won a chance to work elsewhere for all contracted stars, the woman who intrigued the press for years with her apparent disdain for her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, well, that same woman has also now heard about Brexit, possibly about the Welsh football campaign, and, yes, probably also about the Kardashians, as well as about everything else that has happened in between. We know, at least, that she has heard about Mark Rylance. “I am overwhelmed by his accomplishments,” she told the writer Roger Lewis.
In a piece in the Times last week, Lewis also has de Havilland wryly complain that “anyone who has ever heard my name has the distinct impression I was put under the sod years ago”.
Elsewhere, the actress has admitted that even at her great age there are things she has not had time to fit in. She wishes chiefly that she could go back in time and take up her college scholarship place, cast aside when she won her first film contract in order to play Hermia in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
De Havilland, who was born to British parents and is of the same family as the aircraft manufacturers, is one of the very few great survivors of the golden age of Hollywood. It is now really only Kirk Douglas, at 99, who can compete.
The healthiest of us may reach our centenaries, but in the case of a creative talent, of course, they really can live on and on. Their books, films and plays will keep talking down the decades and their music goes forward with us, regardless of when it was composed.
But the stories, paintings and sculptures also offer more than valuable entertainment and a distraction. Culture, both high and low, shows us what we were and how we have responded to what is around us. And happily, in the case of a film star such as De Havilland, we will still go on looking up at a lovely face on a screen, first captured on celluloid 80 years ago, for as long as we have the good sense to appreciate it.
