For more than half a century, millions of people around the world grew up with Gone With the Wind , Margaret Mitchell's epic Civil War novel, which was transformed by MGM Studios into one of America's most celebrated and highest box-office-grossing films of all time. In 1939, just five years after Olivia delivered a graduation speech at Los Gatos High School, she won an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of the quiet heroine, Melanie Hamilton. It was a heady taste of success for a small-town girl.

Born in 1916 to Lillian and Walter de Havilland, both British citizens living in Japan, Ms. de Havilland recalls "being deposited by my amah, Yoné-san, at my mother's feet among wonderful, vari-colored scraps of fabric, while a tailor fitted my mother with new raiment." The tailor was known for his ability to copy designs of the great French couturiers of the day.

Unfortunately, it seemed Walter de Havilland cared little for his wife and children. In 1919, her unhappy marriage prompted Lillian to book passage on the Siberia Maru, bound for San Francisco, with 3-year-old Olivia and her younger sister, Joan, in tow. Within the year, Lillian and the girls moved to Saratoga for better weather, and settled into a home on La Paloma Avenue. Lillian obtained a divorce from Walter and married George Fontaine in 1925, but he too proved a poor choice for husband and father, and the girls endured his frequent cruelty. Neither Olivia nor Joan, who later adopted her stepfather's surname, was to remain in the Fontaine home for very long.

Despite a difficult relationship with her stepfather, Olivia enjoyed a great deal about Saratoga and Los Gatos. "One of my favorite haunts was Hakone Gardens. The estate was created by Mrs. Charles Stine, a friend of my mother's, who often invited us there for Sunday lunch. Another haunt was Miss Bean's Hill, a wonderful hillside where wildflowers grew in abundance," she said in response to one of the questions sent to her at her Paris home.

The high school "hot spot," according to Olivia, "was the Eatmore Creamery on North Santa Cruz Avenue, where you could get a keen milkshake for 10 cents. At Kirk and Bill's just up the road, if I had enough pocket money, I could order that most delectable of concoctions, a root-beer float. Kirk and Bill were kind about extending credit, but they kept strict accounts. When I dropped by after an 18-year absence, they presented me with a bill dated 1934 and made out in the sum of $1.81. I paid it on the spot. Kirk and Bill trusted me for 20 years."

Many who knew de Havilland during her childhood days in Saratoga and Los Gatos predicted she would have a successful life, as an actress or otherwise. It was during her years at Saratoga Grammar School that Olivia began to shine. She achieved top grades, played hockey, participated in school debates, served as associate editor of the school magazine, and won a public-speaking award. Despite serious stage fright, she appeared in an eighth-grade school production of Hansel and Gretel, followed by a pageant, Cinderella in the Redwoods, staged at Stanford University. She'd caught the acting bug.

Willys Peck, a former lawyer, a San Jose Mercury News editor and a columnist for the Saratoga News , remembers young Olivia as "the consummate Alice," in the Foothill Club's 1933 performance of Alice in Wonderland.

"Watching her," said Peck, "you'd think, Olivia is Alice, she's that convincing."

Peck exchanged a few letters with Ms. de Havilland over the years, including an inquiry to her on behalf of the Saratoga Historical Society. "She was gracious, very gracious about writing back and supporting activities at the Society," said Peck.

While at Los Gatos High School, Olivia took on a variety of leadership roles, including editor of the school yearbook, secretary of the student body, and a lead player in several stage productions during her junior and senior years. Recalling her favorite high school productions, de Havilland said, "I most enjoyed performing in J.M. Barrie's period production, Quality Street ." She even sketched costume designs for some of the plays during her high school domestic science class. Classmates called her "Liv" and described her often as "charming."

The forward to the 1934 Wildcat Yearbook, of which Olivia was editor, carried a heartfelt message that seems wise beyond a senior's years: "Although Old Man Depression has done his best to upset high school traditions, the Class of '34 has felt that the custom of publishing the Wildcat is too valuable to discontinue."

In fact, as Olivia tells it, "By the time we reached high school, this country was deep in a national calamity, the Great Depression, and this had sobered us. Though most people in Los Gatos and Saratoga had a roof to shelter them, enough to eat, and warm clothing in winter, people elsewhere in the valley were not so lucky, and men would walk all the way from San Jose hoping to find here some friendly door where, in exchange for doing some chore, they would receive a meal or a 25-cent piece to take home to their families."

As a young woman, Olivia's mother had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and she steadfastly encouraged Olivia and Joan in their pursuit of acting, but Olivia's father grew so angry at what he considered a silly distraction that he gave Olivia an ultimatum to quit school plays or leave his house. Being fiercely independent and focused on pursuing her passion for the stage, Olivia boldly chose the latter. With the help of friends, Olivia rented a room, stayed on the honor roll, and continued acting.

At Los Gatos High School, Olivia's English teacher Margaret Douglas supervised the Dramatic Club, which swelled to 60 members during Olivia's junior and senior years on campus.

"She was a marvelous teacher," said de Havilland, "with a natural flair for, and keen interest in, the theatre." Ms. de Havilland recalls memorable field trips to San Francisco to see artist Katherine Cornell in such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Candide and Joan of Arc.

Olivia also remembers her development as a young actress "in Saratoga's amateur theatrical productions, under Dorothea Johnston's aegis, of Alice in Wonderland and A Midsummer Night's Dream." She also credits Johnston, whose mother ran the Saratoga Inn, as being "particularly helpful in my professional theatre debut playing Hermia in Max Reinhardt's extraordinary presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream." The production opened in the Hollywood Bowl in September of 1934, and immediately caught the attention of Hollywood movie studios.

Early in 1935, Warner Brothers put Olivia under contract to play Hermia in the film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. According to de Havilland, "Making a film ... is harder than playing in the theatre. In the cinema one does not have the benefit of a four-week rehearsal period, and scenes are frequently shot out of sequence."

Her role as Hermia ultimately gained Olivia the attention of George Cukor, the first director assigned to Gone With the Wind. While virtually every leading lady in Hollywood was vying for the title role of Scarlett O'Hara, won by Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland saw Melanie's role as the one to pursue, and Cukor considered her a perfect fit.

While Cukor and producer David O. Selznick agreed that Olivia was right for the part of Melanie, her contract with Warner Brothers prevented her from working with other studios. Not without humor, Olivia recalls, "Negotiations between Selznick and Jack Warner (an unreasonable man) failed until I invited Mrs. Warner (a charming, sympathetic woman) to tea at the Beverly Hills Brown Derby. She persuaded her husband to loan me to Selznick. I knew instinctively that an extraordinary destiny lay before the film, and in this I was not mistaken!"

During his lifetime, the late John Baggerly wrote scores of columns for the Los Gatos Weekly-Times and Los Gatos Times-Observer, many of them containing updates on Olivia's career achievements. During the mid-1940s, after several years with Warner Brothers, Olivia was frustrated by the studio's offerings of weak, unsuitable roles in lackluster films: she wanted to grow her talent. The way John told it, "Olivia rebelled for better parts and was put on six months' suspension. Later, when Warner Brothers would not release her at the end of her contract, de Havilland sued the studio and won a landmark decision that set a studio player's contract at seven years." That ruling became known as the de Havilland decision.

Restless and weary of the frustrations she'd been facing at Warner Brothers, Olivia made use of her time on suspension by visiting U.S. troops stationed in the Aleutian Islands. She visited 3,000 soldiers during her tour despite a case of pneumonia that temporarily hospitalized her.

"Her legal triumph against Warners' literally rewrote motion picture history," according to Charles Higham, author of a biography about Olivia and her sister, Joan. "There is no doubt that the ruthless exploitation of stars had to cease, and Olivia can only be applauded for taking the landmark action that she did." Olivia was free to pursue her own course, and she did, going on to win a string of Oscar awards and nominations in some of Hollywood's most highly regarded films.

For de Havilland, the most challenging and rewarding aspects of acting are clear: "Discovering the heart, soul and mind of a character is the most challenging aspect of acting. The most rewarding is sensing that you and the character have fused and that what comes forth is deep and true."

Among this year's crop of Los Gatos High School freshmen, few have heard of Olivia de Havilland, no less read or seen Gone With the Wind. All that is changing as the high school campus prepares for its annual de Havilland Cup competition this week. The competition, inaugurated by de Havilland herself in 1952, awards a silver cup to the student judged by a panel of teachers and professionals to have delivered the best presentation of a dramatic or comedic monologue of their choosing. In an era where strong communications skills are a valued asset, the competition stirs up a lot of interest—and stage nerves—among participating students.

Although she moved to Paris in the 1950s, de Havilland has returned periodically to her hometown of Saratoga and her Los Gatos High School alma mater. In 1988, at the age of 71, de Havilland came back in response to an invitation from Ted Simonson to speak at graduation exercises on the school's 100th anniversary.

"Olivia made it a point to meet with me, and with teachers and students in order to prepare her speech," said Simonson, whose career as a teacher, dean and principal of Los Gatos High School spans 50 years. "Then she telephoned a long-time contact, I believe it was a speech coach in New York, who helped her review and fine-tune the speech. When it came time to address the students, we had to put a box behind our large wood podium so the tiny Ms. de Havilland could see over the podium. She spoke on behalf of the students, not as a celebrity, and her message was timeless."

" ... the most extraordinary instrument at your disposal is your very own mind. Find ways to develop its special capacities of imagination, reasoning, judgment. Feed it accurate information—it cannot function for you without this. It will help you recognize opportunity when it appears, to be prepared for opportunity when it comes, to develop opportunity fully when you respond to it. It will help you choose the work for which you are best fitted, not only in ability and training but also in temperament. And if you ever encounter failure, it will help you discover what failure is trying to tell you—that there is something you needed to know and did not know, or something you already knew and did not take seriously enough. And it may even help you find that tiny golden seed within that failure which, if you nurture it, may bring to you some positive outcome you might never have achieved in any other way."

Today, at 87 and sharp as ever, de Havilland believes that for high school students who wish to pursue an acting career, "it is always a good idea to go on to a university that has a good theater and cinema course." It's no surprise that de Havilland has agreed to lend her name to the Los Gatos High School Theatre Improvement Project (TIP) as part of that group's fundraising in support of needed renovations to the high school's aging Prentiss Brown Auditorium. "And in regard to high school students in general," said de Havilland, "the counsel I gave to the Class of 1988 still holds: Your best friend is your own mind. Take good care of it."

1950—Oscar, Best Actress,

The Heiress

1949—Nomination, Best Actress,

The Snake Pit

1947—Oscar, Best Actress,

To Each His Own

1942—Nomination, Best Actress,

Hold Back the Dawn

1940—Nomination,

Best Supporting Actress,

Gone With the Wind

Emmy Awards

1987—Nomination, Outstanding

Supporting Actress,

Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna

Golden Globe Awards

1987—Golden Globe,

Best Performance by a

Supporting Actress, Anastasia

1953—Nominated, Best

Motion Picture Actress, Drama,

My Cousin Rachel

1950—Golden Globe, Best Motion

Picture Actress, The Heiress

New York Film Critics

Circle Awards

1949—NYFCC, Best Actress,

The Heiress