Joan Fontaine, the patrician blond actress who rose to stardom as a haunted second wife within the Alfred Hitchcock film “Rebecca” in 1940 and won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a terrified newlywed in Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” died at her place Carmel, Calif., on Sunday. She was 96.
Her death was confirmed by her assistant, Susan Pfeiffer.
Ms. Fontaine was solely twenty four once she took home her Oscar in 1942, the youngest best-actress winner at the time, however her triumph was equally notable as a result of her older sister, Olivia First State Havilland, was conjointly a candidate that year. The sisters were alienated for many of their adult lives, a state of affairs Ms. Fontaine once attributed to her having married associated won an Oscar before Ms. First State Havilland did.
Until the Alfred Hitchcock films, Ms. Fontaine’s flick career had not looked promising. While Ms. First State Havilland was stellar opposite Errol Flynn in hits like “Captain Blood” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and captured the sought after role of Melanie Hamilton in “Gone With the Wind,” Ms. Fontaine struggled.
In 1937 and 1938, she created ten principally forgettable photos, alternating between screwball comedies like “Maid’s Night Out,” within which she marked as a personage mistaken for a servant, and dramas like “The Man United Nations agency Found Himself,” within which she contend a noble nurse determined to save lots of a hobo’s life.
In 1939, she appeared in 2 critically acclaimed photos. She was a minor player in “Gunga Din,” with Grant and thespian boy., however created a sway within the all-female ensemble forged of “The ladies.” Those roles were followed by her career-making performance in “Rebecca,” that Frank S. Nugent praised within the big apple Times because the film’s “real surprise” and “greatest delight.”
In the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, Ms. Fontaine — solely slightly typecast as keep, aristocratical or each — had a thriving flick career, stellar opposite the era’s male superstars, as well as Cyril Lodowic Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power and James Stewart.
She contend the title character in “Jane Eyre” (1944), opposite Orson Welles; a romantic neurotic in each “The Constant Nymph” (1943), that she received associate Oscar nomination, associated GHB Ophüls’s “Letter From an Unknown Woman” (1948); the prim girl Rowena in “Ivanhoe” (1952); and a British colonial within the Caribbean within the early race-relations drama “Island within the Sun” (1957). That film’s mere suggestion of associate interracial romance, between Ms. Fontaine’s character and Harry Belafonte’s, was thought-about daring.
She created her Broadway debut in 1954, substitution Deborah Kerr as a headmaster’s sensitive mate United Nations agency helps a young man affirm his gender in “Tea and Sympathy.” Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New royal house Times, most well-liked Ms. Kerr however referred to as Ms. Fontaine’s performance “forceful and thoughtful” and her big apple look “one of the higher transference deals with Hollywood.”
She came back to Broadway once, within the late Nineteen Sixties, substitution Julie Harris within the comedy “Forty Carats,” a couple of old woman’s romance with a younger man.
Joan First State {beauvoir|Beauvoir|Simone First State Beauvoir|feminist|women's rightist|women's liberationist|libber|existentialist} de Havilland was born to British oldsters on Oct. 22, 1917, in Tokyo, wherever her father, Walter, a relation of the aviation pioneer Sir Geoffrey First State Havilland, was operating as a patent professional person. In 1919, her mother, the previous Lillian manoeuvre, rapt along with her 2 daughters to Saratoga, Calif., close to metropolis. The First State Havillands unmarried , and Lillian married St. George M. Fontaine, a retail store govt, whose family name Joan later took as her anonym.
Ms. Fontaine, United Nations agency conjointly in short used the name Joan Burfield (inspired by a la street sign), rapt back to Japan at fifteen to measure along with her father and to attend the yankee college there. Returning in 1934, she before long rapt to la to pursue a movie career.
Her final big-screen roles were the heroine’s jaded older sister in “Tender is that the Night” (1962), supported the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and a panicked British school teacher in “The Devil’s Own,” a 1966 horror film.
Ms. Fontaine married and unmarried fourfold. Her 1st husband was Brian Aherne, the British-born stage and film actor, whom she married in 1939 and unmarried in 1945. She married William Dozier, a movie producer, in 1946, and that they had a female offspring. once their divorce in 1951, she was married to mineworker Young, a movie and tv writer-producer, from 1952 to 1961, and Alfred Wright boy., a Sports Illustrated editor, from 1964 to 1969.
In 1952, she took during a 5-year-old Peruvian woman, Martita Pareja Calderon. once the woman ran away in her teens, Ms. Fontaine was unable to bring her home as a result of she had ne'er formally adopted the woman within the u. s..
Ms. Fontaine is survived by her sister, Ms. First State Havilland; a female offspring, Deborah Dozier Potter of state capital, N.M.; and a grandchild.
She continuing acting well into her 70s. She appeared in tv movies, as well as “The Users” (1978) and “Crossings” (1986), supported a Danielle Steel novel. A series of appearances on the series “Ryan’s Hope” in 1980 light-emitting diode to a Daytime award nomination. Her final screen role was as a verificatory royal grandma in “Good King Wenceslas” (1994) on the Family Channel. She conjointly did theater across the u. s. and abroad, however ne'er came back to film.
“Looking back on Hollywood, staring at it even these days,” Ms. Fontaine wrote in “No Bed of Roses” (Morrow, 1978), her life, “I notice that one outstanding quality it possesses isn't the lavishness, the perpetual sunshine, the golden opportunities, but fear.” even as “careers typically begin out of the blue there,” she determined, “they will evaporate even as quickly.”
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