Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, known professionally as Joan Fontaine, was a British-American actress best known for her starring roles in Hollywood films.
Background
Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland was born on 22 October 1917, in Tokyo, Japan, to English parents. Her father, Walter de Havilland (1872–1968), was educated at the University of Cambridge and served as an English professor at the Imperial University in Tokyo before becoming a patent attorney. Her mother, Lilian Augusta Ruse de Havilland Fontaine (1886–1975), was educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and became a stage actress who left her career after going to Tokyo with her husband. Her mother returned to work with the stage name "Lillian Fontaine" after her daughters achieved prominence in the 1940s. Joan's paternal cousin was Sir Geoffrey de Havilland (1882–1965), an aircraft designer known for the de Havilland Mosquito, and founder of the aircraft company which bore his name. Her paternal grandfather, the Reverend Charles Richard de Havilland, was from a family from Guernsey, in the Channel Islands.
De Havilland's parents married in 1914 and separated in 1919, when Lilian decided to end the marriage after discovering that her husband used the sexual services of geishas; the divorce was not finalized, however, until February 1925.
Taking a physician's advice, Lilian de Havilland moved Joan—reportedly a sickly child who had developed anaemia following a combined attack of the measles and a streptococcal infection—and her elder sister, Olivia de Havilland, to the United States. The family settled in Saratoga, California, and Fontaine's health improved dramatically.
Education
Joan was educated at nearby Los Gatos High School, and was soon taking diction lessons alongside her elder sister. When she was 16 years old, de Havilland returned to Japan to live with her father. There she attended the Tokyo School for Foreign Children, graduating in 1935.
Joan returned to California. 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.
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.
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.
Fontaine assumed the title role in Jane Eyre (1943), with Orson Welles as her Rochester, as well as that 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, 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.
On December 15, 2013, Fontaine died in her sleep of natural causes at the age of 96 in her Carmel Highlands home. After Fontaine's death, de Havilland released a statement saying she was "shocked and saddened" by the news. Fontaine was cremated.
Joan Fontaine was an Academy Award winning British American actress famous for movies like ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Suspicion.’ She appeared in more than 45 feature films in a career that spanned five decades.
Joan Fontaine won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in ‘Suspicion’ (1941). Having won an Academy Award for her role in Suspicion, Fontaine is the only actor to have won an Academy Award for acting in a Hitchcock film. Furthermore, she and her sister remain the only siblings to have won major acting Academy Awards. She also received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for the same film.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Fontaine has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1645 Vine Street.
Fontaine was a Democrat who not only supported the run of Adlai Stevenson but also had a personal relationship as well, stating, :
"We had a tenderness for each other that grew into something rather serious. There was so much speculation about our marrying in the press that over lunch at his apartment in the Waldorf Towers he told me he could not marry an actress. He still had political ambitions and the "little old ladies from Oshkosh" wouldn't approve. I told him it was just as well. My family would hardly approve of my marrying a politician."
Views
Quotations:
"I hope I'll die on stage at the age at 105, playing Peter Pan."
"I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia (sister Olivia de Havilland) did, and if I die first, she'll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it!"
"It seems there's just no room left for elegance in this paper-plate, blue-jean world. And I, for one, think it's a shame."
"The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent."
"The main problem in marriage is that for a man sex is a hunger like eating. If the man is hungry and can't get to a fancy French restaurant, he goes to a hot dog stand. For a woman, what is important is love and romance."
"One puzzling thing about men - they allow their sex instinct to drive them to where their intelligence never would take them."
"My sister is a very peculiar lady. When we were young, I wasn't allowed to talk to her friends. Now I'm not allowed to talk to her children, nor are they permitted to see me. This is the nature of the lady. Doesn't bother me at all."
"You know, I've had a helluva life. Not just the acting part. I've flown in an international balloon race. I've piloted my own plane. I've ridden to the hounds. I've done a lot of exciting things."
"If you keep marrying as I do, you learn everybody's hobby."
"Marriage, as an institution, is as dead as the dodo bird."
"You know, I've had a helluva life."
Membership
She was a member of Episcopal Actors Guild.
Interests
Outside of acting, Fontaine was also noted as being a licensed pilot, an accomplished interior decorator, and a Cordon Bleu-level chef.
Politicians
Adlai Stevenson
Connections
Fontaine was married and divorced four times. Her first marriage was to actor Brian Aherne, in 1939 in Del Monte, California; they divorced in April 1945.
In May 1946, she married actor/producer William Dozier in Mexico City. They had a daughter, Deborah Leslie, in 1948, and separated in 1949. Deborah is Fontaine's only biological child. The following year, Fontaine filed for divorce, charging Dozier with desertion. Their divorce was finalized in January 1951.
Fontaine's third marriage was to producer and writer Collier Young on November 12, 1952. They separated in May 1960, and Fontaine filed for divorce in November 1960. Their divorce was finalized in January 1961.
Fontaine's fourth and final marriage was to Sports Illustrated golf editor Alfred Wright, Jr, on January 23, 1964, in Elkton, Maryland; they divorced in 1969.
While in South America for a film festival in 1951, Fontaine met a four-year-old Peruvian girl named Martita, and informally adopted her. Fontaine met Martita while visiting Incan ruins where Martita's father worked as a caretaker. Martita's parents allowed Fontaine to become Martita's legal guardian to give the child a better life. Fontaine promised Martita's parents she would send the girl back to Peru to visit when she was 16 years old. When Martita turned 16, Fontaine bought her a round-trip ticket to Peru, but Martita refused to go and opted to run away. Fontaine and Martita became estranged following the incident. While promoting her autobiography in 1978, Fontaine addressed the issue, stating, "Until my adopted daughter goes back to see her parents, she's not welcome. I promised her parents. I do not forgive somebody who makes me break my word."
Father:
Walter Augustus de Havilland
(31 August 1872 – 20 May 1968)
He was a British patent attorney who became professor of Law at Waseda University and was one of the first Westerners to play the game of Go at a high level. He was the father of British-American film stars Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine.
Mother:
Lilian Fontaine
(11 June 1886 – 20 February 1975)
She was a British actress and mother of Academy Award-winning British-American actresses Dame Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine.
She is a British-American former actress, whose career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films, and was one of the leading movie stars during the golden age of Classical Hollywood.
Spouse (1):
Brian Aherne
(2 May 1902 – 10 February 1986)
He was an Anglo-American actor of both stage and screen. He was one of the top cinema character actors in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Spouse (2):
William Dozier
(February 13, 1908 – April 23, 1991)
He was an American film and television producer and actor.
Spouse (3):
Collier Young
(August 19, 1908 – December 25, 1980)
He was an American film producer and writer, who worked on many films in the 1950s, before becoming a television producer for such shows as NBC's Ironside and CBS's The Wild, Wild West, as well as the supernatural anthology series One Step Beyond (1959–61).
Spouse (4):
Alfred Wright, Jr.
(m. 1964–1969)
Daughter:
Debbie Dozier
(b.November 5, 1948, Santa Monica, California, United States)
