Olivia De Havilland Tribute - The Heiress (1949)

115 mins | Rated G | Classic

Directed by William Wyler | Starring Olivia De Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins.

To celebrate the life & career of the truly remarkable Hollywood Golden era actor Olivia de Havilland, we will be playing one of the crown jewels of her filmography which she won an Academy Award for, William Wyler's 1949 The Heiress on Sunday 23rd August.

Directed with a keen sense of ambiguity by William Wyler, this film based on a hit stage adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square pivots on a question of motive. When shy, emotionally fragile Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland, in a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning turn), the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by the promise of romance. Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she believes they are? Or is Catherine’s calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker?

A graceful drawing-room drama boasting Academy Award–winning costume design by Edith Head, THE HEIRESS is also a piercing character study riven by emotional uncertainty and lacerating cruelty, in a triumph of classic Hollywood filmmaking at its most psychologically nuanced.