Olivia de Havilland, a top box-office name of the 1930s and 40s whose credits include Gone With the Wind, has died. She was 104.
The veteran actress and two-time Oscar winner died in her sleep at home in Paris on Saturday, PEOPLE confirms.

Less than a month earlier, de Havilland, who had been the oldest surviving star of the controversial 1939 film, which also starred Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, celebrated her birthday on July 1.Online movie streaming services

She was, by all accounts, one of a kind.

Known for her dedication and hard work, “She rarely stops acting (or rehearsing) when she leaves the set,” Time magazine marveled in a 1948 cover story, when she starred in the shocking screen exposé about mental institutions, The Snake Pit.
Born in Tokyo in 1916, “Livvie,” her younger sister Joan Fontaine (herself an Oscar-winning actress, for Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1941 Suspicion“) and their actress-mother Lillian moved to California in 1919 after their father Walter, a British patent attorney, took up with the housekeeper.

A Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Nights Dream led to Olivia’s contract in 1935 with Warner Bros., which produced a movie version of the Shakespeare comedy. Reprising her role as Hermia, de Havilland started costarring the following year with the studio’s great swashbuckler Errol Flynn, and, in eight films together, the duo became one of the great screen teams of their time.
During that time and ever after, de Havilland insisted that, despite Flynn’s oversexed reputation and her own crush on him, the two were never real-life lovers. Their movies together included Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Technicolor classic The Adventures of Robin Hood, in 1938.

Both have confessed to being in love with the other – despite Flynn’s marriages to other women – and both have denied the relationship was consummated.

“There are no words to describe my feelings for Errol Flynn,” she told PEOPLE in July 2016. De Havilland praised him as an “extraordinary” man: “Wonderful to talk to and listen to, most of the time fascinating company.”

But it was her role the following year, as the eternally selfless Melanie Hamilton, the cousin from Atlanta who steals the gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) from under from the clutches of the vixen Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), that inspired an entire generation of Americans to name their baby daughters Melanie.

The film has since been criticized for its romanticized portrait of the pre-Civil War South, with HBO Max recently adding an introduction that provides historical context.

Off-screen, de Havilland was anything but sweetness and light. With fierce determination and guts, she fought studio boss Jack L. Warner — indeed, the entire studio contract system — and in a landmark legal case that came to be known as the De Havilland Law helped end binding seven-year contracts for all Hollywood actors