Olivia de Havilland recalls how a story got distorted concerning her turning down an important role, and managed to stay in circulation anyway:
Olivia de Havilland is going to set the record straight. Her reason for turning down the role of Blanche Du Bois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" wasn’t because she believed a lady would never play the part, despite accounts to the contrary. "That is a complete misquote," she says. "I had just given birth to my son. That was a transforming experience, and when the script was presented to me, I couldn’t relate to it." [Olivia de Havilland Recalls Her Role — in the Cold War.]
Similarly, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking recounts, at his personal Web site, how the press erroneously concluded that he drank heavily in the early days of his battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis:
Not knowing what was going to happen to me, or how rapidly the disease would progress, I was at a loose end. The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with the research I had just started […] I took to listening to Wagner, but reports in magazine articles that I drank heavily are an exaggeration. The trouble is once one article said it, other articles copied it, because it made a good story. People believe that anything that has appeared in print so many times must be true.
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