Joan Fontaine (natural October 22 1917) is an American actress. She was innate Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland inside Tokyo, Japan, a immature girl of Walter de Havill&, and the previous Lilian Augusta Ruse, an actress known by her stage title of Lillian Fontaine, world health organization married inside 1914. Fontaine's father, Walter, was the British patent attorney with a practice inside Japan.

She is the immature sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, from whom she has been estranged for numerous years; two tended to Los Gatos High School and the Notre Dame Convent Roman Catholic girls school inside Belmont, California.

At a age of deuce, Joan's parents divorced. Joan was the sickly kid & got developed anemia following a concerted attack of the measles and a strep illness. Upon the advice of a doctor, Joan's mother moved her & her sister to the United States in which it settled in the town of Saratoga, California. Joan's health improved dramatically & she was shortly ingesting diction lessons along with her sister. She was likewise an extremely brightly little one & scored 160 in an iq test while she was trey. After she was 15, Joan returned to Japan & accept her father for ii years.

After she returned to the U.S., she followed Olivia's lead & began to pop up within stage & in films, however was refused permission by their mother, world health organization allegedly favorite Olivia, to have a last name. Therefore Joan was forced to invent the title (Joan Burfield, & late Joan Fontaine, using her have mother's previous stage title).

Joan mass produced her stage debut in the West Coast production of Call It A Day in 1935 and was soon signed to an RKO contract. Her film debut was the little role around No More Ladies (1935). She continued appearing inside microscopic arethe around astir the xii films however failed to produce a hard impression & her contract was non renewed while it expired inside 1939, a equivalent season she married her foremost married man, the late British actor Brian Aherne.

Her luck changed 1 nighttime at the dinner whilst she detected herself sitting next to producer David O. Selznick. She & Selznick began discussing a Daphne Du Maurier novel Rebecca, and Selznick asked her to audition for the section of the unidentified heroine. She endured a arduous sextet-year series of film tests, along by having hundreds of more actresses, prior to securing the section. A film marked a Western debut of British director Alfred Hitchcock. Inside 1940, the film was freed to glowing reviews & Joan was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress. She didn't win that season (Ginger Rogers took home a award for Kitty Foyle) however she did winside a as a result season for Better Actress in Suspicion (1941), which was also directed by Hitchcock.

She went in to continued profits when you took a 1940s in which she excelled in romanticist melodramas. Among her memorable films when you took this period was A Constant Nymph (1943), Jane Eyre (1944), Ivy (1947) and Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948). Her film successes slowed a little when you took a Fifties & she besides began appearing inside television & on the stage. She win full reviews for her role on Broadway in 1954 as Laura in Tea & Sympathy paired Anthony Perkins. When you took a Sixties, she continued her stage appearances around many productions, among the two Private Lives, Cactus Flower and an Austrian production of The Lion around Winter. Her endure theatrical film was A Witches (1966), which she also co-produced. She processed sporadic television appearances throughout a Seventies & Eighties & was nominated for an Emmy for the soap opera ''Ryan's Hope in 1980.

Among her more talents, Miss Fontaine has been the licenced pilot, the prizewinning ballonist, renowned rider, the prize-winning tunthe fisher, & the hole-within-of these golf player, the Cordon Bleu chef & a licenced interior decorator. commissioned pilot. She lives within Carmel, California in relative reclusion.

She published her autobiography No Bed of Roses in 1979.

Miss Fontaine has been married 4 days—to actors Brian Aherne (1939-1945), William Dozier (1946-1951), Collier Young (1952-1961) and magazine editor Alfred Wright, Jr. (1964-1969). She has of these girl, Deborah Leslie Dozier (born around 1948), from either her union sustaining Dozier, & the second girl, Melinda, a Peruvian adoptee, world health organization ran out of personal. Fontaine is reported to become estranged from either her girl too, even because she found that it were secretly maintaining the relationship by owning their aunty Olivia.

She has the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1645 Vine Street.

Filmography
No More Ladies (1935) Quality Street (1937) The Man Who Found Himself (1937) You Can't Beat Love (1937) Music for Madame (1937) A Damsel in Distress (1937) Maid's Night Out (1938) A Million to One (1938) Blond Cheat (1938) Sky Giant (1938) The Duke of West Point (1938) Gunga Din (1939) Man of Conquest (1939) The Women (1939) Rebecca (1940) Suspicion (1941) This Above All (1942) The Constant Nymph (1943) Jane Eyre (1944 movie) (1944) Frenchman's Creek (1944) The Affairs of Susan (1945) From This Day Forward (1946) Ivy (1947) Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) The Emperor Waltz (1948) You Gotta Stay Happy (1948) Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) Born to Be Bad (1950) September Affair (1950) Darling, How Could You (1951) The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1952 Something to Live For (1952) Ivanhoe (1952) Decameron Nights (1953) Flight to Tangier (1953) The Bigamist (1953) Casanova's Big Night (1954) Hollywood Mothers and Fathers (1955) (short subject) Serenade (1956) Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) Island in the Sun (1957) Until They Sail (1957) A Certain Smile (1958) Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) Tender Is the Night (1962) The Witches (1966) Busby Berkeley (1974) (documentary) All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story (1982) (documentary)

Sources

Fontaine, Joan. There is no Bed of Roses. Berkley Publishing Class action, 1979. ISBN 0425050289

Todays Life 1944''. H.W. Wilson Company, 1945.