Joan Fontaine

Joan Fontaine was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in 1917 in Tokyo, Japan, to British parents, and moved to California as a child with her older sister, the actress Olivia de Havilland. The sisters' rivalry became one of the most documented estrangements in Hollywood history, reportedly beginning in childhood and hardening over subsequent decades; the two did not speak for years at a time, and their feud persisted until Fontaine's death. Fontaine's career reached its height under Alfred Hitchcock, who cast her as the anxious young bride in Rebecca (1940) opposite Laurence Olivier, earning her the first of two consecutive Best Actress nominations, and then in Suspicion (1941) opposite Cary Grant, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress — the only performer ever to win an acting Oscar in a Hitchcock-directed film. In Suspicion, Fontaine played a woman who comes to suspect her charming husband, played by Grant, of plotting to murder her, a role built around sustained psychological dread. She continued as a leading lady through the 1940s and 1950s in films including The Constant Nymph (1943), for which she received a further Oscar nomination, and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), directed by Max Ophüls. Her later career included television work and stage appearances, and she was married four times. Fontaine died in 2013 in Carmel, California, two days after her sister Olivia's own advancing age made reconciliation between them permanently foreclosed. She is remembered as one of the defining Hitchcock heroines and for an Oscar win that remains a singular data point in the director's history with the Academy.