Take a moment, if you will, to imagine that you have been transported back to the year 1939 and that you are standing on the movie set during the making of Gone With the Wind. Think of the actors that you will meet as they walk across the sound stages. There will be, of course, the stunningly beautiful English actress Vivien Leigh dressed for her role as Scarlett and, quite possibly, lingering nearby might be her real-life husband Laurence Olivier.

Clark Gable is certainly close at hand, as is another actor from Great Britain in the form of Leslie Howard. There are many others—Hattie McDaniel perhaps, or Evelyn Keyes, and you might even recognize Thomas Mitchell. Naturally, hovering over the scene will be the director Victor Fleming and, on any given day, you might encounter the famed producer David O. Selznick should he have decided to pay a visit.

You would be forgiven, amidst all the hustle and bustle of an active movie set, for not realizing that you are witnessing the birth of one of Hollywood’s true masterpieces—a film that has reigned, even until today, as the highest grossing movie ever—a cool 1.8 billion dollars so far! That’s ok…even the actors did not know what a hit it was going to be.

Yet there is another star you will encounter—a young woman who played the female lead opposite Errol Flynn in the 1938 action film The Adventures of Robin Hood. This actress, of course, is Olivia de Havilland, known now as Dame Olivia de Havilland ever since the Queen of England named her as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

De Havilland was a woman with a very strong personality and was perhaps not always the saint she played on screen, but the Queen decreed her to be Dame Olivia and so it is! An aside: de Havilland was the one who finally successfully challenged the big studio employment practices of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. The court’s decree is known to this day as The de Havilland Law.

“Amazing” is used all too often today, but I know of no other word that fits. For unlike all the other luminaries I listed above, Olivia de Havilland, born 1 July 1916, is at 102 years old still very much alive as I write this in January 2019. This means that had you chatted with her on that 1939 set of Gone With the Wind, she would be able to sit down with you this very day and share those memories.

If you are like me, and fascinated by the spans of time, then then you will appreciate that such distant events were witnessed by people who are sill living. How long ago was 1939? Well, 80 years ago in simple numbers, but the second world war had not yet been fought and the United States was still in the grip of the Great Depression. Heck, in those days the United States still lacked basic electricity service to many parts of the nation. It would have been one thing had de Havilland been on the movie set as a toddler or a pre-teen, but she was a woman of 23 when she was played a leading role and interacted with her fellow legends Gable. Leigh, and Howard.

To put this in perspective, statistics show that over 1/2 of all the people born in 1939 are no longer alive (they would be 80 today). That means that Dame Olivia has outlived well over half of the babies born when she was already an established actress and making this film.

Dame Olivia entered the movie business not long after they became “talkies” yet she can now, should she wish, have internet-streamed to her at home in Paris just about any film Hollywood has produced. Yet these kinds of comparisons, as true as they might be, border on cliché so here is another perspective of how long this was. She dated Howard Hughes after his around the world flight in 1938, and while dating Jimmy Stewart from 1940/41 he gave her flying lessons!

Surprisingly however, Dame Olivia is not alone when it comes to first-hand experience in the golden days of Hollywood. Kirk Douglas, born in December 1916 as Issur Danielovitch Demsky, is only six months younger than Olivia and is still with us.

Now if there were ever a person whose life has been characterized by hard work it is Kirk Douglas. Even those who know what it is like to beaver away relentlessly at tasks have to concede that Douglas knew what it was like to put in a day’s toil. From delivering newspapers as a boy and selling snacks to mill workers to help his New York family buy food, he claims that he held over 40 different jobs before he got his first acting gig.

There are two things that I very much admire about Douglas as I sit in the bleachers of the average and read about him. First, I am struck at how hard he worked to cultivate his talent. He knew other actor’s lines and even the stage directions for their scenes. He was never the kind of guy to “just phone it in” when he had a role and I respect that commitment. He had talent in spades, but he wisely knew success is almost always the combination of both talent and energy.

In fact, Douglas has often spoken about how many talented individuals he personally knew who had what it took (that indescribable part of some people’s makeup that we call “it”), but ended up falling by the wayside due to a lack of energy. Granted he was tough on both himself and others and that could be difficult, but hard work was the key to success for him and he was not going to try anything different.

The second noteworthy aspect of his story is that he did not start appearing in film roles until he was 30—definitely about the time that most men start to wonder if they have set off on the right career. To be fair, he already had made progress as a stage actor and had that to fall back on had he needed, but it shows his confidence and grit in sticking with it.

There is no question that we over-glamorize Hollywood and the men and women who have appeared on the big screen—they are mere mortals after all. Yet we find their talents alluring and are bedazzled at how they portray different personas. But whether you are a fan of old Hollywood or not, if you wonder what it would be like to have been there for the filming of some of the 20th century’s greatest movies, then Dame Olivia and Kirk Douglas are still here to as living memories of those times.

Should you really not be a fan of movies, then you can at least take any very old person from the arts, academia, sports, government, etc., and imagine being there when they were young and making their mark on life. A few of them are still here. Perhaps history is not that dusty after all?!

Here is a link of actors who are still alive. Perhaps you will recognize a few of the names.

In the meantime, Happy New Year and stay average for 2019!