Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland (October 22, 1917 – December 15, 2013), known professionally as Joan Fontaine, was an English-American actress who is best known for her starring roles in Hollywood films during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Fontaine appeared in more than 45 films in a career that spanned five decades. She was the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland. Their rivalry was well-documented in the media at the height of Fontaine’s career.
In her teenage years, Joan went to live for some time with her father in Tokyo and then came back to the USA permanently. In the mid-1930s, she decided to follow in the footsteps of her sister Olivia, who had embarked into to an acting career.
After some stage work, Joan made her screen debut, as Joan Burfield, in No More Ladies (1935), a Joan Crawford vehicle. In 1936, she was noticed in the play Call It a Day and soon got a movie contract at R.K.O. At the time, she had chosen to call herself Joan Fontaine, after her stepfather’s surname.
In the second half of the 1930s, Joan Fontaine mostly played nondescript roles on screen and stayed in the shadow of her more famous sister, Olivia de Havilland. Everything changed thanks to Rebecca (1940), produced by David O’Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. All of a sudden, she became hot property in Hollywood and was at the height of her career during the 1940s.
If she could perfectly play sweet and restrained characters in films, she was quite different in real life, as periods of estrangement from her daughters and her sister would suggest. However, Joan’s relationship with some other people seems to have been more cordial. Susan Pfeiffer, her secretary in later years, described her as “one of the kindest, loving women I have ever met” and Police Officer Bill Cassara, who met her in 1997 and befriended her, reminisced in 2021 about “her warm conversation and company.”
She released an autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978. Having won an Academy Award for her role in Suspicion, Fontaine is the only actress to have won an Oscar for acting in a Hitchcock film. She and her sister remain the only siblings to have won lead-acting Academy Awards.
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