Thursday Minute
No. 180 | October 14, 2010

Living Legends

Our theme this week
Living actresses who are 90 and older

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Luise Rainer
Tuesday         —   Maureen O’Hara
Wednesday    —   Betty Garrett

Joan Fontaine

Born October 22, 1917
Age 92

The de Havillands were a British family living in Tokyo, where the father was an attorney.  Two daughters were born a year apart.  The older was Olivia, the younger, Joan.  The girls and the mother soon moved to California, and not long after, the parents divorced.  Olivia and Joan grew up to become actresses, as their mother was, with Olivia keeping the family name and Joan eventually adopting her mother’s stage name, Fontaine.

Joan made her film debut in MGM’s No More Ladies in 1935 (billed as Joan Burfield).  She then appeared in a string of RKO pictures, including A Damsel in Distress (1937), Gunga Din (1939), and The Women (1939), and despite the success of some of the films, her RKO contract was not renewed.

Fontaine met producer David O. Selznick as he prepared for Alfred Hitchcock’s American debut, Rebecca, of 1940.  She auditioned and got the female lead, the unnamed second wife of Laurence Olivier’s Maxim de Winter.  Less a thriller than a Gothic romance, the film is hardly the most Hitchcockian of the great director’s movies, but it was among his most successful—his only one to win the Best Picture prize, with a total of eleven Oscar nominations, including one for Fontaine as Best Actress.

Her next film was another by Hitchcock, the noirish thriller Suspicion, of 1941, with Cary Grant as the mysterious husband who may want to kill his wife—or not—and Fontaine as the suspicious spouse who may be just imagining things.  Another success, the film earned three Oscar noms, including one for Best Picture, and Fontaine, at the age of 24, took home the Best Actress statuette.  (She would be the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film.)

She worked steadily in movies though the next decade.  Her credits include the title roles in The Constant Nymph (1943), Jane Eyre (1943), and Ivy (1947).  She starred with Louis Jourdan in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), perhaps the best of the Hollywood films of director Max Ophüls.  Her films of the 1950s were not as successful, and she devoted more time to theater, and later, television.  She starred in a horror film, The Devil’s Own, in 1966, her last movie credit.

Fontaine was married four times and divorced four times, the last in 1969.  The most notable item from her personal life, however, is the difficult relationship she has had with her famous sister, Olivia.  Apparently they were rivals from an early age, vying for their mother’s attention (Joan perceived Olivia as the mother’s favorite), as well as in their Hollywood careers.  Both became Academy Award winners (the only sisters to each win an acting Oscar), with Joan, the younger, winning first, and competing against her sister, among others, in 1941.  Their feud continued for years, until 1975, when they reportedly stopped talking to each other altogether.  Neither has commented publicly on their relationship.

Joan Fontaine lives today in Carmel, California.

---

Suspicion (1941)
Alfred Hitchcock, director
Anthony Berkeley (novel); Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville (screenplay); writers
Harry Stradling Sr., director of photography
Trailer
Joan Fontaine as Lina

The Making of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion”
Part 1
Part 2

---

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
Max Ophüls, director
Stephen Zweig, Howard Koch, writers
Franz Planer, cinematographer
Joan Fontaine as Lisa Berndle, Louis Jourdan as Stephan Brand

---

Quote of note
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
—Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), Rebecca (1940)

…58…59…60.