Joan Fontaine

Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917, Tokyo, Japan—died December 15, 2013, Carmel, California, U.S.) was an English American actress who was known for her portrayals of troubled beauties.

De Havilland was born in Tokyo, where her English father worked as a patent attorney and language professor; her mother was an actress. In 1919 she and her elder sister, Olivia, moved with their mother to California, briefly staying in San Francisco before settling in Saratoga. Her parents divorced in 1925, and both soon remarried. Her stepfather’s demanding standards of behaviour led to conflicts with the girls. In 1933 Olivia moved out (after he insisted that she drop out of a school play that she had been cast in or leave home), and Joan was sent to stay with her father in Tokyo, where she enrolled in the American School. However, she returned to California a year later.

Both sisters had acted in local stage productions as children, and Olivia had begun to pursue acting professionally, signing with Warner Brothers in 1934. In order to avoid comparisons with her sister, Joan—who had also decided to become an actress—was credited as Joan Burfield for her screen debut, No More Ladies (1935), and as Joan St. John for her 1935 stage debut in Kind Lady. Her parallel ambitions amplified long-simmering hostilities between the siblings and set them up for a lifetime of competition and enmity. In 1936 Joan signed with producer Jesse Lasky, who soon sold the contract to RKO Pictures. From that year, when she appeared in the play Call It a Day, she was credited as Joan Fontaine, having assumed her stepfather’s surname.

Britannica Quiz

Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia

In 1937 Fontaine appeared in a string of films, including the track-and-field drama A Million to One, in which she played the love interest of a competitive runner, and the musical A Damsel in Distress. The latter paired her with Fred Astaire, an ill-conceived casting choice that drew attention to her deficiencies as a singer and dancer. However, she proved able to hold her own as an actress opposite Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in Gunga Din (1939), a drama concerning bandits in colonial India, and opposite Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer in George Cukor’s The Women (1939), a snarky romp featuring infidelity and backstabbing.

1 of 3

2 of 3

3 of 3

Fontaine then starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), in which she played the beleaguered successor to the idolized first wife of Laurence Olivier’s character, and Suspicion (1941), in which she played a newlywed who begins to suspect her husband (Grant) of murder. She received Academy Award nominations for both roles and won for the latter. Fontaine was nominated again for her role as a young woman besotted with a composer oblivious to her overtures in The Constant Nymph (1943). Fontaine was granted American citizenship in 1943.

1 of 2

2 of 2

Fontaine assumed the title roles in Jane Eyre (1943), with Orson Welles as her Rochester, and in Ivy (1947), in which she played a scheming murderess. In Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) she starred as the romantic interest of a violent war veteran; in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) she portrayed a woman carrying a torch for a well-known musician; and in Born to Be Bad (1950) she vamped as a social climber masquerading as an ingenue. In Ivanhoe (1952) her character and Elizabeth Taylor’s compete for the affections of the titular Saxon knight. Fontaine appeared as the elder sister of a mental patient in the 1962 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and as a terrorized schoolteacher in the horror film The Witches (1966).

Fontaine also appeared in several episodes of the Ronald Reagan-hosted G.E. True Theatre (1956–61) and in Crossings (1986), a television adaptation of a Danielle Steel novel set during World War II. She retired from acting in 1994. Fontaine’s memoir, No Bed of Roses (1978), details her rise to fame and relates some highlights of her feud with Olivia.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe