Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of “Gone With the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter who challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system, died July 26 at her home in Paris. She was 104. Havilland died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.

De Havilland was among the last of the top screen performers from the studio era, and the last surviving lead from “Gone With the Wind.” During a career that spanned six decades, de Havilland also took on roles ranging from an unwed mother to a psychiatric inmate. She was Errol Flynn’s co-star in a series of dramas, Westerns and period pieces, most memorably as Maid Marian in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” But De Havilland also was a prototype for an actress too beautiful for her own good, typecast in sweet and romantic roles while desiring greater challenges.

Her frustration finally led her to sue Warner Bros. In 1943 when the studio tried to keep her under contract after it had expired, claiming she owed six more months because she had been suspended for refusing roles. De Havilland prevailed, with the California Court of Appeals ruling that no studio could extend an agreement without the performer’s consent.

De Havilland went on to earn her own Academy Award in 1946 for her performance in “To Each His Own.” A second Oscar came three years later for “The Heiress.”

She was also famous, not always for the better, as the sister of Fontaine, with whom she had a troubled relationship. In a 2016 interview, de Havilland referred to her late sister as a “dragon lady” and said her memories of Fontaine, who died in 2013, were “multi-faceted, varying from endearing to alienating.”

De Havilland allegedly never got along with Fontaine, a feud magnified by the 1941 Oscar race that placed her against her sister for best actress honors. Fontaine was nominated for the Hitchcock thriller “Suspicion” while de Havilland was cited for “Hold Back the Dawn."

Asked by a gossip columnist if they ever fought, de Havilland responded, “Of course, we fight. What two sisters don’t battle?”

Like a good Warner Bros. soap opera, their relationship was a juicy narrative of supposed slights and snubs, from de Havilland reportedly refusing to congratulate Fontaine for winning the Oscar to Fontaine making a cutting crack about de Havilland’s poor choice of agents and husbands.

De Havilland once observed that Melanie Wilkes’ happiness was sustained by a loving, secure family, a blessing that eluded the actress even in childhood. She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of a British patent attorney. Her parents separated when she was 3, and her mother brought her and her younger sister Joan to Saratoga, California.

De Havilland’s acting ambitions dated back to stage performing at Mills College in Oakland, California. While preparing for a school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she went to Hollywood to see Max Reinhardt’s rehearsals of the same comedy. She was asked to read for Hermia’s understudy, stayed with the production through her summer vacation and was given the role in the fall. Warner Bros. wanted stage actors for their lavish 1935 production and chose de Havilland to co-star with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck. She signed a five-year contract with the studio and went on to make “Captain Blood,” “Dodge City” and other films with Flynn.

“Oh, Errol had such magnetism! There was nobody who did what he did better than he did,” said de Havilland, whose bond with the dashing actor remained, she would insist, improbably platonic. She did date Howard Hughes and James Stewart and had an intense affair in the early ’40s with director John Huston.

Although she once filmed as many as three pictures a year, her career slowed in middle age. She made several movies for television, including “Roots” and “Charles and Diana.” In 2009, she narrated a documentary about Alzheimer’s, “I Remember Better When I Paint.”

Now, she is survived by her daughter, Gisele Galante Chulack, her son-in-law Andrew Chulack and her niece Deborah Dozier Potter. Goldberg said funeral arrangements are private and that memorial contributions should go to the American Cathedral in Paris.

Hillel Italie reported from New York. AP Paris correspondent John Leicester in Paris and former AP Writer Dolores Barclay in New York contributed to this report.