Olivia de Havilland (as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes) in a publicity shot for “Gone With The Wind.” Photo courtesy Rosalyn Gammill

A few weeks ago, Dame Olivia de Havilland celebrated her 103rd birthday and, with it, my own fond remembrance of her remarkable career and character. As a young girl, I used to watch Gone with the Wind and pray that I would grow up to be the embodiment of Miss De Haviland’s Melanie Wilkes, whose poise and wisdom seemed timelessly angelic in a world besieged by the devils of modernity.

While Miss De Havilland’s career extended far beyond this role (she played a chillingly effective villain in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte alongside Bette Davis), her role as Melanie still reverberates in the eyes and hearts of many. For while Scarlett represents the spartan survival that must contend in a New South, Melanie represents the heart and soul of the old South—a place in which graciousness overrules force, and grace leaves its deepest mark in the face of defeat.

While today’s cynical viewers imagine Melanie as a static, statuesque, ideal, she represents those abiding qualities of love and selflessness in circumstances that deprive us of both, leaving us jaded in a world of ashes. But Melanie, as Miss De Haviland skillfully portrayed her, reminds us that character is not determined by material survival, but by spiritual steadfastness. While Scarlett’s determination is to “live. . . if I have to lie, cheat, or steal,” Melanie’s is to love unceasingly. In her final words to Scarlett, she states, “Whatever happens, I’ll love you, just as I do now, until the day I die.” Melanie reveals that the true heroine is not defined by her ability to survive, but by her capacity to love in the midst of indescribable suffering. Miss De Haviland herself stated of Melanie, “There is a special place in my heart for [her]. She was a remarkable character – a loving person – and because of that, she was a happy person. And Scarlett, of course, was not.”

“Famous people,” Miss De Haviland would later write, “feel that they must perpetually be on the crest of the wave, not realising that it is against all the rules of life.” “You can’t be on top all the time,” she concluded;” It isn’t natural.” Instead, she said, “we must endure what comes, with laughter.” Miss De Havilland believed that the merits of acting, and of living, for that matter, lay not in the perpetual struggle for notoriety, but in the capacity to maintain a joyful and enduring devotion to something higher than the self. How we live is not determined by our successes, but by an abiding benevolence of the heart in the vicissitudes of life.

As Miss De Haviland would say of the film, we might say of Melanie: “It will go on forever, and how thrilling that is. It has this universal life, this continuing life, [for] every nation has experienced war and defeat and renaissance.” For this lesson and for her example, I thank Miss De Haviland and wish her many happy returns.

Kathleen Hines is a doctoral student in Renaissance Literature from Southern Methodist University. Among her interests are portrayals of corporeality and disease in   Renaissance poetry and drama. Outside of the academy, she has also written about women of the antebellum South and the politics of Christianity in the Middle East.