Olivia de Havilland wrote her first memoir in 1962. Fifty-four years later, Every Frenchman Has One is being reissued, and if its mission then was to remind people she was still alive, it can only be even more helpful in that regard now that she is turning 100 years old.
That's right, today, the two-time Oscar winner (she nabbed her first one 70 years ago and her second three years later) becomes one of the very few major actors to celebrate a centennial.
While I know a number of lesser and perhaps even mid-level movie and TV performers have hit 100, the only major stars I could think of to do it are George Burns, Bob Hope (both died at 100) and Luise Rainer (she passed away in late 2014 at 104). Of those three, certainly only Burns and Hope were major stars throughout their lives and died as household names.
READ: Definitive List of Performers Who Are 80+ Years Old
Now, we have Olivia de Havilland. (Kirk Douglas will have to wait until December to become the fourth.)
When we think of major stars who lived very long lives, we think of people like Marlene Dietrich (90), Mae West (87), Greta Garbo (84), Gloria Swanson (84) and while they didn't exactly die young, their ages are less wow-inducing today than when they died in the '80s and '90s in their eighties and nineties.
But 100 is still something special.
Hats off to de Havilland, who—according a recent Vanity Fair profile—still climbs up and down the five flights of her Paris townhouse.
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