Joan Fontaine
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| Joan Fontaine | |
 from the trailer for The Women (1939) |
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| Birth name | Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland |
| Born | October 22, 1917 (age 89) Tokyo, Japan |
| Academy Awards | |
|---|---|
| Best Actress 1941 Suspicion |
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Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917) is an Academy Award-winning Japanese-born British actress, who became an American citizen in April 1943.
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[edit] Early life
She was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in Tokyo, Japan, the younger daughter of Walter de Havilland, and the former Lilian Augusta Ruse, a British actress known by her stage name of Lilian Fontaine, who married in 1914. Fontaine's father, Walter, was a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan.
She is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, from whom she has been estranged since 1975; both attended Los Gatos High School and the Notre Dame Convent Roman Catholic girls school in Belmont, California.
At the age of two, Joan's parents divorced. Joan was a sickly child and had developed anemia following a combined attack of the measles and a streptococcic infection. Upon the advice of a physician, Joan's mother moved her and her sister to the United States where they settled in the town of Saratoga, California.
Joan's health improved dramatically and she was soon taking diction lessons along with her sister. She was also an extremely bright child and scored 160 on an intelligence test when she was three. When she was fifteen, Joan returned to Japan and lived with her father for two years.
[edit] Stage career
When she returned to the U.S., she followed Olivia's lead and began to appear on stage and in films, but was refused permission by their mother, who allegedly favoured Olivia, to use the family name. So Joan was forced to invent a name (Joan Burfield, and later Joan Fontaine, utilizing her own mother's former stage name).
Joan made her stage debut in the West Coast production of Call It A Day in 1935 and was soon signed to an RKO contract. In later life she appeared on Broadway in Forty Carats.
[edit] Film career
Her film debut was a small role in No More Ladies (1935). She was selected to appear in a major role alongside Fred Astaire in his first RKO film without Ginger Rogers: A Damsel in Distress (1937) but audiences were disappointed and the film flopped.
She continued appearing in small parts in about a dozen films but failed to make a strong impression and her contract was not renewed when it expired in 1939, the same year she married her first husband, the late British actor Brian Aherne. That marriage was not a success.
Her luck changed one night at a dinner party when she found herself seated next to producer David O. Selznick.
She and Selznick began discussing the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca, and Selznick asked her to audition for the part of the unnamed heroine. She endured a grueling six-month series of film tests, along with hundreds of other actresses, before securing the part.
Rebecca marked the American debut of British director Alfred Hitchcock. In 1940, the film was released to glowing reviews and Joan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
She didn't win that year (Ginger Rogers took home the award for Kitty Foyle) but Fontaine did win the following year for Best Actress in Suspicion, which was also directed by Hitchcock. This is the only Academy Award winning performance directed by Hitchcock [1].
[edit] Dysfunctional sibling relationship
Both sisters were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1942. Fontaine won for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). Biographer Charles Higham has described the events of the awards ceremony, stating that Joan "felt guilty about winning; given her lack of obsessive career drive..."
Several years later, when de Havilland won the Oscar, she famously brushed by Fontaine, waiting with her hand extended, because Olivia had allegedly taken offense at a comment Joan made about Olivia's then-husband. Higham records that the sisters always had an uneasy relationship, even since early childhood, when Olivia would rip up the clothes Joan had to wear as hand-me-downs, forcing Joan to sew them back together.
Both sisters have refused to comment on their feud, but Higham has stated that the above described event in 1942 was the final straw for what would become a lifelong feud, but this is debatable.
The sisters finally ceased to speak at all in 1975, because, according to Fontaine, de Havilland had not invited her to a memorial service for their late mother, Lilian de Havilland, who had recently died from cancer. Olivia claims she told Joan, but that Joan brushed her off, saying she was too busy to attend.
[edit] Career rise
She went on to continued success during the 1940s in which she excelled in romantic melodramas. Among her memorable films during this time were The Constant Nymph (1943), Jane Eyre (1944), Ivy (1947) and Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948). Her film successes slowed a bit during the 1950s and she also began appearing in television and on the stage. She won good reviews for her role on Broadway in 1954 as Laura in Tea and Sympathy opposite Anthony Perkins.
During the 1960s, she continued her stage appearances in several productions, among them Private Lives, Cactus Flower and an Austrian production of The Lion in Winter. Her last theatrical film was The Witches (1966), which she also co-produced. She made sporadic television appearances throughout the 1970s and 1980s and was nominated for an Emmy for the soap opera, Ryan's Hope in 1980.
She resides in Carmel, California in relative seclusion.
She published her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1979.
[edit] Marriages and personal life
Joan Fontaine was married four times:
- Brian Aherne (1939 - 1945)
- William Dozier (1946 - 1951)
- Collier Young (1952 - 1961)
- Alfred Wright, Jr. (1964 - 1969), a magazine editor.
She has one daughter, Deborah Leslie Dozier (born in 1948), from her union with Dozier, and another daughter, Martita, a Peruvian adoptee, who ran away from home. Fontaine is reported to be estranged from her daughters as well, possibly because she discovered that they were secretly maintaining a relationship with their aunt Olivia.
Joan Fontaine has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1645 Vine Street.
[edit] Filmography
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| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle |
Academy Award for Best Actress 1941 for Suspicion |
Succeeded by Greer Garson for Mrs. Miniver |
[edit] Sources
- Fontaine, Joan. No Bed of Roses. Berkley Publishing Group, (1979) ISBN 0-425-05028-9
- Higham, Charles. Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Haviland and Joan Fontaine. Coward McCann, May 1984, 257 pages.
Current Biography 1944. H.W. Wilson Company, 1945.
[edit] External links
