Olivia de Havilland's suing

[Scott]

I did some math. For any Gone with the Wind fans, this is what Melanie Hamilton would have looked like around 1940 if she hadn't died at the end of the movie:




I feel funny marveling at this, but Olivia de Havilland is still alive, I tell ya! She's still alive! She's 101. Lives in Paris. She was born in Tokyo.

I did not know this, but Joan Fontaine was her sister. They were estranged most of their adult lives. Fontaine thought it was because she won an Oscar and got married before de Havilland did which means de Havilland must have been a horrible, horrible person. de Havilland is in the news because she's suing over a recent episode of an anthology series called Feud, about Joan Crawford's feud with Bette Davis.

According to the New York Times:

“When ‘Feud’ was first being publicized, but before it went on the air, I was interested to see how it would portray my dear friend Bette Davis,” Ms. de Havilland wrote in an email. “Then friends and family started getting in touch with me, informing me that my identity was actually being represented on the program. No one from Fox had contacted me about this to ask my permission, to request my input, or to see how I felt about it. When I then learned that the Olivia de Havilland character called my sister Joan ‘a ****’ and gossiped about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s personal and private relationship, I was deeply offended.”

[Scott]

Just one other credited cast member from Gone with the Wind is still alive---Mickey Kuhn who played Beau Wilkes, Ashley and Melanie's son. There's still time to do a Gone with the Wind sequel with the original cast! It could be set in 1944. 100-year-old Milanie Hamilton Wilkes is living on her pension as a Confederate war widow with her 80-year-old son in a run down apartment. They'd have to explain why she was still alive after she died at the end of the first movie, but that wouldn't be too big a problem.

"Mother, I think you should see a doctor about that!"

"I don't trust doctors, not after Dr Meade wrongly declared me dead."

"That was 1873. Medical science has advanced since then. How old was Dr Meade? He must have been born in the 1700's."

[Scott]

The case was thrown out... :-(

The judges ruled today that Catherine Zeta-Jones’s portrayal of the Oscar-winning actress in the program “is not highly offensive to a reasonable person as a matter of law”. De Havilland’s lawsuit claimed that the portrayal damaged her “professional reputation for integrity, honesty, generosity, self-sacrifice and dignity.”

FX Nets in August had filed a motion to strike the complaint, but that action was denied. The company then appealed to the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals last week, and today it ruled unanimously to throw out the suit. The court also said that de Havilland will have to pay FX Networks’ legal fees.

The two-time Oscar winner and Gone with the Wind actress had claimed that her name and likeness were used to promote the docudrama without her permission and that the series damaged her reputation by casting her in a false light as a hypocrite “selling gossip in order to promote herself at the Academy Awards, criticizing fellow actors, using vulgarity and cheap language.” She took particular issue with Zeta-Jones’ de Havilland referring to Joan Fontaine as her “**** sister.”