Her return engagement

OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND, the last remaining great Hollywood star of both the golden '30s and '40s, is an irresistible woman. When the subject of birthdays comes up in the middle of an interview, she looks the writer straight in the eye and declares, "I'm old enough to be your mother!," promptly brushing aside all polite demurrals. There's something at once amusing and touching when the remark is directed at a man on the cusp of 70 and comes from a movie star who's about to turn 90. Clearly the truthfulness that characterizes De Havilland's acting comes from the woman herself.

Generations of De Havilland's fans would recognize her instantly. The expressive dark eyes, the lovely complexion, the apple cheeks remain unchanged, framed by an elegant swath of silver hair, truly her crowning glory, swept up in an impeccable French twist. Blessed with robust health and an abundant love of life, she is a lively raconteur to whom laughter comes easily. De Havilland, her distinctive voice as rich and mellow as ever, understands that enduring beauty, beyond good genes, is a matter of spirit rather than artifice.

For her recent interview, in the garden of her journalist daughter Gisele Galante's spacious beachside home, De Havilland was dressed simply in a powder-blue skirt, an ink-blue blouse and accented by a colorful silk scarf and a pair of gold earrings.

De Havilland, who has lived in France since marrying the late Paris Match editor Pierre Galante in 1955, is in town for a tribute to her being held Thursday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The event launches a retrospective of her finest films screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning Friday and running through July 1. De Havilland will discuss "The Heiress" preceding its 8 p.m. screening Sunday.

She is undoubtedly best remembered as the noble-minded yet resilient Melanie in "Gone With the Wind," managing to bring dimension and humanity to a woman of unassailable purity and garnering an Oscar nomination for supporting actress. But she found even wider-ranging roles in "To Each His Own" (1946), for which De Havilland won her first best actress Oscar as a small-town upstate New York teenager who finds herself unwed and pregnant through a whirlwind World War I romance, and in "The Snake Pit" (1948), which earned her a best actress nomination for her portrayal of a young wife stricken with mental illness and thrust into a hellish state institution.