The Full Biography
Joan Fontaine. Actress. Hitchcock’s frightened bride, and the younger sister who won first.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a woman in a vast house she does not own. Manderley. A second Mrs. de Winter who flinches at a housekeeper and at a name that is not hers. The year was 1940. The picture was Rebecca. What the still cannot show is that the girl on the stairs had already changed her name to get out of another woman’s billing, and that the town would spend the next seventy years trying to file her under a feud.
She was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland on October 22, 1917, in Tokyo, to British parents. Her father, Walter, taught English and practiced patent law. Her mother, Lilian, had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and left the stage for a marriage that did not hold. A sister, Olivia, was fifteen months older. When the household broke, Lilian took the girls to California and raised them in Saratoga, in the hills above the Santa Clara Valley. Joan was a sickly child. California air and a long adolescence put color in her. The sisters were close, then competitive, then something harder. That weather would follow them into every dressing room in town.
Olivia went first, and kept the family name. Lilian, who favored the elder girl, would not at first let Joan use it. Joan tried Joan Burfield for a bit part in MGM’s No More Ladies (1935). The name that stuck came from her stepfather, George M. Fontaine. She used it on the West Coast stage in Call It a Day, then signed with RKO. The door was not a Selznick test. It was a contract, a string of B pictures, and a billing that did not mention de Havilland.
RKO put her opposite Fred Astaire in A Damsel in Distress (1937), his first picture without Ginger Rogers. Audiences stayed home. George Stevens used her in a small part in Gunga Din (1939). George Cukor used her in a smaller one in The Women. She was pretty, English, and replaceable. Then she sat next to David O. Selznick at a dinner and they talked about Daphne du Maurier. He asked her to test for the second Mrs. de Winter. Hundreds of actresses wanted the part. The tests ran six months. She was not yet twenty-three when Hitchcock, making his first American picture, decided the fear on her face was the picture.
Rebecca made the face a climate. Laurence Olivier was Maxim. Judith Anderson was Mrs. Danvers. Fontaine played a girl who has married a house. She was nominated for Best Actress. Ginger Rogers won, for Kitty Foyle. The next year Hitchcock put her opposite Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941). The studio softened the ending. The fear did not soften. On February 26, 1942, at the fourteenth Academy Awards, she won Best Actress. Olivia was nominated the same night, for Hold Back the Dawn. They remain the only siblings to win lead acting Oscars. The industry made a meal of it. The rift was real. It was also more ordinary than the columns allowed: two gifted women, one household, not enough air.
What the town wanted next was more crying. “They seemed to want to make me cry the whole Atlantic,” she said. Fox borrowed her for This Above All. Warner put her with Charles Boyer in The Constant Nymph (1943) and she earned a third nomination. Selznick sold Jane Eyre (1943) to Fox; she played the governess opposite Orson Welles’s Rochester. Frenchman’s Creek (1944) was another du Maurier and a picture she did not love. When Selznick offered her another sad-sack part, she refused. He suspended her. She had already learned, from watching Olivia, that a studio calendar is not a favor.
In 1946 she and her second husband, the producer William Dozier, formed Rampart Productions. The first film was Ivy (1947), a thriller in which she was not asked to tremble. The picture that lasts is Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), directed by Max Ophüls, produced by John Houseman, opposite Louis Jourdan. She plays a woman who loves a man who never quite sees her. Specialists name that performance first. The Oscar night cannot contain it. The feud cannot eat it.
I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it.Joan Fontaine, 1978
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the sisters, not the work. After the town filed her as Olivia’s problem, she kept taking parts that were not a second Mrs. de Winter. Born to Be Bad (1950), for Nicholas Ray, let her play a climber instead of a flinch. September Affair (1950) put her with Joseph Cotten in a weeper that sold tickets. Ivanhoe (1952) at MGM, opposite Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor, is the costume picture the Sunday afternoon still runs. Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) asked her to stand in a plot about a fake murder that becomes real. Island in the Sun (1957), a romance the censors watched like a fire, put her in a West Indian climate opposite Harry Belafonte’s weather. A Certain Smile (1958). Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), for Irwin Allen, is the studio job a star takes when the frightened-bride parts have dried up. Tender Is the Night (1962) asked her to be the doctor’s wife in Fitzgerald’s wreck. Broadway in Tea and Sympathy (1954), taking Deborah Kerr’s role opposite Anthony Perkins. Television when features thinned. A Hammer picture, The Witches (1966), which she also co-produced — her last theatrical film. She did not become a waxwork of 1941. She became a working actress with a name she had chosen. Rampart, the company she built with Dozier, is the adult door the Selznick contract had not offered: a chance to pick the temperature of a picture instead of waiting to be told to cry. Ivy is the first proof. Ophüls is the lasting one. The 1950s costume jobs and the 1960s television paid the years when the frightened-bride parts had dried. She flew her own plane between some of those jobs. The stills never showed the license.
Six things most people never knew
- Tokyo is the first room, as it was for Olivia. British parents. Saratoga second. The “pure Hollywood sister” line is false.
- Fontaine is a chosen name, not a birthright. Lilian would not let her use de Havilland. She took her stepfather’s surname and walked through a different door.
- She is the only performer to win an acting Oscar in a Hitchcock film. Rebecca is the first monument. The statue is Suspicion. The ceremony was 1942.
- Letter from an Unknown Woman is the performance the feud cannot eat. Ophüls. 1948. A picture the specialists name first.
- She flew, cooked at Cordon Bleu level, and decorated houses for a living. The frightened bride on screen was, off it, a licensed pilot and a woman who could run a room without a director.
- She adopted a Peruvian child named Martita, then lost her. Fontaine had promised the girl’s parents a visit home at sixteen. Martita refused. They became estranged. The promise sat between them and did not move.
She married four times. Brian Aherne, the English leading man, from 1939 to 1945. William Dozier, from 1946 to 1951; their daughter, Deborah Leslie, was born in 1948 and is Fontaine’s only biological child. Collier Young, the producer, from 1952 to 1961. Alfred Wright Jr., a Sports Illustrated editor, from 1964 to 1969. The marriages are in the file because they changed the work: Dozier built Rampart with her; Young was in the house when Martita arrived. Friends from sets describe a professional who was exact, private, and finished with a reporter’s idea of a sister act. Deborah has had to share a mother who is a feud in the columns and a Hitchcock blond on Sunday television. Both are incomplete. The Cordon Bleu kitchen, the pilot’s license, and the decorating jobs are the other file: a woman who could run a house without a director and who treated Carmel as a profession, not a retirement postcard.
The later years
The features stopped. The life did not. She published No Bed of Roses in 1978 and did not sand Olivia. The book is not a settlement. It is a woman telling the kitchen how it felt from her chair: Tokyo, Saratoga, the dinner beside Selznick, the night of the envelope, the four marriages, the adopted child who would not come home on the promised visit. In 1982 she went to Berlin as jury president of the international festival, a civic job for a star the American features had finished with. She played the soap Ryan’s Hope in 1980 as Paige Williams and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy. She did the miniseries Crossings in 1986. She did a last television film, Good King Wenceslas, in 1994, as Queen Ludmilla. Then she stopped. She had nothing left to prove to a camera that still wanted her to look afraid.
After twenty-five years in New York she moved to Carmel Highlands, to a house she called Villa Fontana, on the coast south of the valley where Lilian had raised the girls. Gardens. Dogs. Needlework. A pilot’s license that had already been a fact when the stills still asked her to tremble. She decorated houses for a living when the parts thinned, Cordon Bleu credentials in the kitchen, a woman who could run a room without a director. She lectured. She gardened. She was, to the town below the highlands, a precise older Englishwoman, not a monument. Deborah, the daughter with Dozier, remained the biological child in the file. Martita remained the estrangement. Friends who saw her in those decades describe a hostess who was exact about a table and finished with a reporter’s idea of a sister act.
She told a reporter she had no family ties left that required a city, and that if you stay busy you do not notice age. She meant it as a method, not a boast. On December 15, 2013, she died in her sleep of natural causes at Villa Fontana. She was ninety-six. Olivia, in Paris, outlived her. For a moment the town had only one sister left to ask about the other. The Oscar for Suspicion stayed in the house that had been named for the name she chose. The frightened bride on Sunday television is a clip. The Highlands years were the life: a garden, a dog, a memoir that did not sand the kitchen, and a woman who had already written the joke about who would die first. Tokyo is the first room. Saratoga is the second. Villa Fontana is the last address. Rebecca, Suspicion, and the Ophüls letter are the weather. The feud is the climate other people preferred. She outlived the climate by living on the coast and keeping the garden. She had already been a jury president in Berlin, a soap actress with an Emmy nomination, a memoirist who would not sand a sister, and a neighbor who gardened as if that were the real profession. Olivia’s statement from Paris, when the news came, was shock and sadness. The columns reached for the feud. The Highlands house had already answered by staying quiet. Deborah remains. The Oscar remains the only acting statue Hitchcock ever sent anyone home with. Manderley remains the still. Villa Fontana remains the last room she named for herself. She had flown, cooked, decorated, and written the kitchen down. She died in her sleep at ninety-six, on the coast where the girls had been raised, having already told the joke about the order.
After she was gone
Deborah remains. Rebecca still teaches a young actress what a house can do to a voice. Letter from an Unknown Woman still plays in revival houses for people who have tired of the feud. The Oscar for Suspicion is still the only acting statue Hitchcock ever sent anyone home with. Olivia’s statement, when the news reached Paris, was that she was shocked and saddened. The sister story gets retold because it is easy. The work is the correction.
She came out of Tokyo and Saratoga, took a name that was not her sister’s, walked into Hitchcock’s first American picture, won the envelope first, and then made a film the columns could not use. She lived to ninety-six in a house she named for herself, wrote a memoir that did not sand the kitchen, and died in Carmel after writing the joke about the order. The still at Manderley will last. It should. The life behind it was longer, dryer, and more her own than the still can say.
If you only remember the night she beat Olivia, you have the climate. If you remember the second Mrs. de Winter, the unknown letter, and Villa Fontana, you have her.
Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain (PD-US, copyright not renewed) · via Wikimedia Commons