Olivia de Havilland was hopeful her Oscar nomination for Gone With The Wind (1939) would lead to better roles at her home studio Warner Brothers. Instead, to her chagrin she was put on the B-movie My Love Came Back, as a replacement for Priscilla Lane, who had rejected the part of violin student Amelia. Luckily for de Havilland, director Curtis Bernhardt's rewrites on the script impressed studio brass enough to bump production up to A-movie status. The story, about how Amelia's mixing classics and jazz attracts the patronage of an older music professional (Charles Winninger), much to his children's distress, was scrubbed clean of any hint of impropriety by the Hays Office, but Bernhardt still had a difficult road ahead. De Havilland's frustration with learning how to fake the fiddle led to all kinds of brainstorming about how to shoot her many concert scenes -- everything from shooting in silhouette to having a professional violinist wear an Olivia De Havilland mask (!). (In the end, a skilled violinist hid behind de Havilland and did the fingering for her.)

By Violet LeVoit