“Walking through life with you, ma’am, has been a very gracious thing.”
— George Armstrong Custer bidding goodbye to his wife as he leaves for what both know is his last tour of duty in “They Died With Their Boots On.”

Olivia de Havilland, who turned nine decades old on July 1, still remembers that day 65 years ago when Errol Flynn uttered those parting words to her on a backlot soundstage in Burbank, Calif.

“I felt real sorrow when we filmed that,”she said, at a sold-out salute from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences earlier this year. “I felt the same way the next day and the day after that. I felt it for many days and couldn’t understand why. Then, years later, I realized something inside me sensed this would be the last picture I’d ever make with Errol Flynn.”

Little Big Horn was indeed the last stop in their cinematic adventures. Ms. De Havilland and Flynn were the screen team-in-residence at Warner Bros., romping through eight films in seven years. Their films were exuberant examples of old-guard moviemaking that has — frankly, my dear — gone with the wind.The gamut ran from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to “Dodge City” and was liberally splashed with swagger and dash.

“Captain Blood,” their initial pairing, starts storming the barricades of Film Forum for a threeweek siege of “Summer Swashbucklers” August 4. Their best outing — if not the genre’s crowning achievement — “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” adds some classic parry-and-thrust August 18 and 19. Derring-do was never better done.

The Flynn-de Havilland epics were bread-andbutter basics for the Brothers Warner, but somehow they didn’t pack the prestige of, say, Paul Muni in a beard or Bette Davis in a snit. Which is why both stars wanted out of those constraining period costumes.

Ms. de Havilland earned her first Oscar nomination in 1940 for her portrayal of Melanie Hamilton in “Gone With the Wind” — in the supporting category (the award was won by the movie’s Mammy, Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American so honored). That same year, Ms. de Havilland costarred with Flynn in the western, “Santa Fe Trail,” starring Ronald Reagan. But as her star was rising, Flynn’s was falling.

Flynn, the more typed and limited of the two, continued to flail about with standard-brand heroics, anesthetized by booze and debauchery. By 1950, he literally couldn’t stand up for the finale clinch in “Montana,” reclining on the ground while Alexis Smith stooped down to kiss him. In contrast, by then de Havilland had two Oscars (out of five nominations) and a plateau of respect — which she effortlessly abdicated in 1955 to marry Paris Match editor Pierre Galante and make France her home.

When she returned to Hollywood for a tribute to her, the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy’s Beverly Hills branch was packed with former co-workers, friends, fans, and industry officials who gave her three standing ovations.

Thickened a tad by time, she now resembles the Queen Mum (whom she played in the 1982 TV flick, “The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana,”admitting as much in a charmingly self-effacing greeting to the crowd: “I very much appreciate the warm welcome. It’s most reassuring because, after all, the years do pass and the pounds do accumulate.Thank you for recognizing me.”

One night in 1958, she was talking with friends in the foyer at the Beverly Hilton Hotel when she was surprised by a kiss on the neck from Flynn. To the shocked embarrassment of both, she didn’t recognize him. “It wasn’t just he was gaunt,” she said. “It was his eyes. They were such merry eyes on screen. Now, there was something dead about them.”

The following year, de Havilland caught a revival of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” in Paris. “I was absolutely enraptured by it — to such a degree I went home and wrote Errol a letter. Then I thought, “No. It’s sentimental. I’d better not send it.” And I didn’t. Two weeks later, he died. It’s a letter I very much wish I’d sent.”

Forty-seven years later at the Goldwyn Theater, there was a farewell-to-the-troops undertow to the evening that remained unstated until the end.

“When you reach your 90th year and you realize you don’t have too many more years of life before you, you tend to look back to those early years — the dreams and ambitions you had then — so I can’t help but think of an April day in 1935 when, between test rehearsals for ‘Captain Blood,’ I sat down on a stage ramp — age 18, I was — with a handsome, magnetic, 25-year-old Tasmanian.”

Ms. De Havilland remembered how she and Flynn kicked around the idea of what they wanted out of life. His answer was immediate: Success! Hers was more thoughtful.

“I said, ‘Respect for difficult work well done.’ Tonight you and the Academy have made me feel that perhaps, after all, I have achieved that young dream.”

Until August 24 (Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).