Joan Fontaine

Joan Fontaine was an actress known primarily for her work in feature films, including an Oscar for best actress in the 1941 thriller Suspicion, starring Cary Grant and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She also appeared in many television programs.

Fontaine, who was the younger sister of another Oscar-winning actress, Olivia de Havilland, was born in 1917 to British parents in Tokyo, Japan, where her father, Walter de Havilland, was working as a patent lawyer. In 1919, her mother moved with the two sisters to Saratoga, in northern California. When her parents divorced, her mother married George M. Fontaine, a department store executive, whose surname she adopted as her stage name.

After a brief return to Japan in her teens, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. She began appearing in films in the late 1930s, including roles in Gunga Din and The Women. Then came her first Hitchcock film, Rebecca, in 1940, followed by Suspicion. Her credits in the years that followed included Jane Eyre, The Constant Nymph, Letter From an Unknown Woman, Ivanhoe, Island in the Sun and Tender Is the Night.

She also worked widely in television, beginning in the 1950s with roles in such programs as Four Star Playhouse and The Ford Television Theatre. Her later television credits included the telefilms The Users and Crossings and episodes of such series as The Love Boat, Bare Essence and Hotel. She also had a recurring role on the daytime drama Ryan’s Hope, for which she earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1980. Her final performance came in 1994 with a role in the telefilm Good King Wenceslas on the Family Channel.

Fontaine died December 15, 2013, in Carmel, California. She was 96.