Joan Fontaine, The Legend, dies at 96
The Oscar-winning actor Joan Fontaine, who found stardom playing naive wives in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Rebecca and also was featured in films by Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray, died on Sunday.
She was 96.
Fontaine, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland, died in her sleep in her Carmel, California home on Sunday morning, her longtime friend Noel Beutel said. Fontaine had been fading in recent days and died peacefully.
Fontaine’s pale, soft features and frightened stare made her ideal for melodrama and she was a big star for much of the 1940s. For Hitchcock, she was a prototype of the uneasy blondes played by Kim Novak in Vertigo and Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie. The director would later say he was most impressed by Fontaine’s restraint.
Fontaine appeared in more than 30 movies, including early roles in The Women and Gunga Din, and the title part in Jane Eyre. She was also in films directed by Wilder (The Emperor Waltz), Lang (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt) and in Ray’s Born to be Bad. She starred on Broadway in 1954 in Tea and Sympathy and in 1980 received an Emmy nomination for her cameo on the daytime soap Ryan’s Hope.
“You know, I’ve had a helluva life,” Fontaine once said. “Not just the acting part. I’ve flown in an international balloon race. I’ve piloted my own plane. I’ve ridden to the hounds. I’ve done a lot of exciting things.”
Fontaine had minor roles in several films in the 1930s, but received little attention and was without a studio contract when she was seated next to producer David O. Selznick at a dinner party near the decade’s end. She impressed him enough to be asked to audition for Rebecca, his first movie since Gone With the Wind and the American directorial debut of Hitchcock.
Hundreds applied for the lead female role in Rebecca, based on Daphne du Maurier’s gothic best-seller about haunted Maxim de Winter and his dead first wife – the title character he obsesses over. With Laurence Olivier as Maxim, Fontaine as the unsuspecting second wife and Judith Anderson as the dastardly housekeeper Mrs Danvers, Rebecca won the Academy Award for best picture and got Fontaine the first of her three Oscar nominations.
Rebecca made her a star, but she felt as out of place off screen as her character was in the film. She remembered being treated cruelly by Olivier, who openly preferred his then-lover Vivien Leigh for the role, and being ignored by the largely British cast. Her uncertainty was reinforced by Hitchcock, who would insist that he was the only one who believed in her.
Hitchcock’s Suspicion, released in 1941, and featuring Fontaine as the timid woman whose husband (Cary Grant) may or may not be a killer, brought her a best actress Oscar and dramatised one of Hollywood’s legendary feuds, between Fontaine and de Havilland, a losing nominee for Hold Back the Dawn.
Competition for the prize hardened feelings that had apparent roots in childhood and endured into old age, with Fontaine writing bitterly about her sister in the memoir No Bed of Roses and telling one reporter that she could not recall “one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood”.
While they initially downplayed any problems, tension was evident in 1947 when de Havilland came offstage after winning her first Oscar, for To Each His Own. Fontaine came forward to congratulate her and was rebuffed. “This goes back for years and years, ever since they were children,” de Havilland’s publicist said.
While Fontaine topped her sister in 1941, and picked up a third nomination for the 1943 film The Constant Nymph, de Havilland went on to win two Oscars and was nominated three other times.
Fontaine was featured in Jane Eyre with Orson Welles and she and Bing Crosby got top billing in Emperor Waltz. Her most daring role came in the 1957 film Island in the Sun, in which she had an interracial romance with Harry Belafonte. Several cities in the US south banned the movie after threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
Fontaine said she left Hollywood because she was asked to play Elvis Presley’s mother. “Not that I had anything against Elvis Presley. But that just wasn’t my cup of tea,” she said.
While making New York her home for 25 years she appeared twice on Broadway, replacing Deborah Kerr in the hit 1953 drama Tea and Sympathy and Julie Harris in the long-running 1968 comedy Forty Carats.
In 1978, she played a socialite in the made-for-TV movie based on Joyce Haber’s steamy novel, The Users. In the ’70s and ’80s she appeared on the television series such as The Love Boat, Cannon, and in Ryan’s Hope.
Fontaine was born Joan de Havilland in 1917 in Tokyo, where her British parents lived. Their mother moved her and her sister, born in 1916, to California in 1919 after the breakup of her marriage. Fontaine took the name of her mother’s second husband.
She married four times: the actor Brian Aherne; the film executive William Dozier; the film producer Collin Hudson Young; and journalist Alfred Wright.
Dozier and Fontaine had a daughter, Deborah Leslie. Fontaine later adopted a child from Peru, Maritita Pareja.
Despite divorce, Fontaine remained philosophical about love and marriage.
“Goodness knows, I tried,” she said after her second marriage failed. “But I think it’s virtually impossible for the right kind of man to be married to a movie star.
“Something happens when he steps off a train and someone says, ‘Step right this way, Mr Fontaine.’ That hurts. Any man with self-respect can’t take it, and I wouldn’t want to marry the other kind.”
Joan Fontaine Bio
The younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine is known for her exceptionally poised performances in Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, including Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940), and “Suspicion” (1941) which earned her an Academy Award, as well as collaborations with Orson Welles in “Jane Eyre” (1944) and “Othello” (1952). Her career trajectory took her from romantic female leads in “The Constant Nymph” (1943) to formidable older women in “Serenade” (1953) and “Island in the Sun” (1957) before winding down in the late sixties. Fontaine later brought Golden Age Hollywood glamour to Broadway and television, and excelled at a variety of non-acting endeavors, including cooking, golf and aviation.
Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in Tokyo, Japan on Oct. 22, 1917, she was the daughter of British patent attorney Walter de Havilland and Lillian Augusta Ruse, a former stage actress; as both she and her father would often recount, the family counted two English kings in their lineage. Plagued by illness as a child, including bouts with anemia and measles, Fontaine was sent with her sister and mother to live in Saratoga, CA, while her father remained in Japan. Her parents’ marriage was already in trouble prior to the move to the States, and the separation preceded a divorce, which became final when Fontaine was two. Academic tests proved Joan to be an exceptionally bright child with an IQ of 160, and she excelled at school. Home life, however, was a different story; she had an uneasy relationship with de Havilland, who was reportedly favored by her mother. The feud eventually became the stuff of Hollywood legend, and by all accounts, was alive and well when both sisters had entered their ninth decades.
Fontaine left Los Angeles in 1932 to live with her father in Japan. She returned a year later and began to develop an interest in acting like her sister, who was making a name for herself on stage. Fontaine adopted the surname “Burfield” for her stage debut opposite May Robson in a 1935 production of “Kind Lady.” The story surrounding her stage name was part of the legend of the feud; allegedly, Fontaine’s mother refused to allow her to bill herself as “de Havilland” because it would interfere with her sister’s career, although other sources stated that Fontaine adopted the name without any prompting. Whatever the case, she soon found herself signed to RKO and made her screen debut with a small role in George Cukor’s “No More Ladies” (1935), starring Joan Crawford. By 1937, she had changed her name again, this time using her stepfather’s surname of Fontaine for a string of minor dramas and musicals. A break came with a major role opposite Fred Astaire in the George Gershwin musical “A Damsel in Distress” (1937), but the picture was a failure at the box office.
Her fortunes began to change in 1939 when she received excellent notices for her performance in “Gunga Din” as the love interest of British soldier Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and later as a naïve newlywed caught in the midst of Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Paulette Godard in Cukor’s film adaptation of “The Women” (1939). That same year, she married her first husband, British actor Brian Aherne, which ended unhappily in divorce in 1945.
A chance seating next to producer David O. Selznick at a dinner party paved the way for her to audition for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940), which became one of her greatest screen triumphs. The auditions were reportedly a grueling experience for all involved, and Hitchcock exploited her weariness for the film’s unnamed narrator, who struggles with the adulation felt for the late title character, who is still worshipped by her new husband (Laurence Olivier) and his malevolent housekeeper (Judith Anderson). The film was a box office success, and made Fontaine both a Hollywood star and an Oscar nominee. However, she lost the trophy to Ginger Rogers in “Kitty Foyle” (1940).
The following year, she reunited with Hitchcock and her “Gunga Din” co-star Cary Grant for “Suspicion” (1941), a crackling psychological thriller about a young woman who discovers that the man she has married – Grant, in a decidedly uncharacteristic turn – is a compulsive liar, thief, and burgeoning murderer. The Academy nominated her again for Best Actress – opposite her sister, who had become a star in her own right thanks to “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) and “Gone With the Wind” (1939), and was nominated for “Hold Back the Dawn” (1941). Fontaine took home the Oscar that evening, and according to legend, she snubbed de Havilland’s attempts to congratulate her as she walked to the podium. Years later, de Havilland would do the same to Fontaine when she accepted her award for “To Each His Own” (1946).
Fontaine soon settled into a series of romantic films which capitalized on her emotional turns in “Rebecca” and “Suspicion.” Most were high quality efforts – she earned her third Oscar nomination as a naïve Belgian girl who falls for a self-absorbed composer (Charles Boyer) in Edmund Goulding’s 1943 adaptation of Margaret Kennedy’s novel “The Constant Nymph,” and played Charlotte Bronte’s eponymous heroine in “Jane Eyre” (1944) opposite Orson Welles as Rochester. “Frenchman’s Creek” (1944) found her English noblewoman romanced by dashing pirate Arturo de Cordova, while “The Affairs of Susan” (1945), “From This Day Forward” (1945) and “Ivy” (1947) found her entangled in one or more love affairs, occasionally with unhappy results. Fontaine also found time to become an American citizen in 1943.
In 1946, she married actor/producer William Dozier – later the man responsible for the TV version of “Batman” (ABC, 1966-68) – with whom she had a daughter, Deborah, in 1948. She also formed a production company with Dozier, called Rampart Productions, which oversaw her 1948 film “Letter from an Unknown Woman” for director Max Ophuls. A heady romance in the style of her collaborations with Hitchcock, it preceded several more hits, including the Billy Wilder musical comedy “The Emperor Waltz” (1948) with Bing Crosby, and a gritty 1948 film noir, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands,” with Burt Lancaster.
Fontaine was absent from productions from 1949 but returned in 1950 for a string of sudsy melodramas, including “September Affair” (1950) and “Born to Be Bad” (1950). High emotion was not relegated to Fontaine’s on-screen appearances; she divorced Dozier in 1951, and adopted a Peruvian orphan, Martita, in 1952, before marring screenwriter Collier Young that same year. Her film career continued on a largely positive if unremarkable path for the next decade or so. There were hits like “Ivanhoe” (1952) with Robert Taylor, and the Bob Hope comedy “Casanova’s Big Night” (1954). She also had an unbilled cameo in Welles’ film version of “Othello” in 1952. She tried her hand at stage work, appearing on Broadway opposite Anthony Perkins in “Tea and Sympathy” in 1954. By the mid-1950s, though, Fontaine was slowly moving out of the leading lady realm and into more mature character parts – “Serenade” (1955) found her a wealthy art patron whose snobbish attitude encourages Mario Lanza to pass her over in favor of poor but kindly Sara Montiel, while Robert Rossen’s class drama “Island in the Sun” (1957) cast her as a high society matron in love with Harry Belafonte’s up-and-coming politician. By the early 1960s, she was appearing more on television as a guest panelist on talk shows and quiz shows than in features. She brought her film career to a close with “The Witches” (1966), a horror film about modern-day black magic which she co-produced with England’s legendary Hammer Films.
Fontaine remained active on stage throughout the sixties, most notably in “Forty Carats,” which brought her to Broadway in 1968. She divorced Young in 1961 and married her fourth husband, journalist Alfred Wright Jr., in 1964 (they would later divorce in 1969).
In the 1970s, Fontaine made infrequent returns to acting in television movies and miniseries like “The Users” (1978) and the sudsy Danielle Steele adaptation “Crossings” (1986). She earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1980 for appearances on the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” (ABC, 1975-1989). In 1986, she stepped in for Loretta Young when the actress departed the Aaron Spelling-produced “Dark Mansions” (ABC), a Gothic-styled primetime soap that failed to earn a spot on the schedule. Her last appearance was for the Family Channel’s Christmas-themed TV movie “Good King Wenceslas” (1994), where she lent her poise and dignity to Queen Ludmilla, grandmother to the title character.
In addition to her acting and producing careers, Fontaine excelled at numerous hobbies and pursuits in her private life. She studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu School, earned her pilot’s license, was an expert golfer and fisherman, and won a championship as a member of a hot air ballooning team. In 1978, she published her autobiography, titled No Bed of Roses which detailed the infamous de Havilland blood feud that had lasted their entire lives.
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