With the death of Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine this weekend at the age of 96, the group of stars still with us from the Golden Age of Hollywood continues to shrink. There is Fontaine’s sister, of course — 97-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who won Best Actress Oscars in 1946 and 1949. We are still graced with the presence of 103-year-old Luise Rainer who won back-to-back Oscars in 1936 and 1937. And there remain a handful of other acclaimed actors from the 1930s and 40s including Kirk Douglas (97), Mickey Rooney (93), Maureen O’Hara (93), and Lauren Bacall (89).
A lot of the coverage of Joan Fontaine’s passing referred to her rivalry and estrangement with Olivia de Havilland. This story is not new — it dogged the sisters from the first moment Joan appeared on screen in 1935. What is it about human nature that makes us always want to pit high-profile siblings against each other? Not that the story was created out of thin air. Over the years, both women admitted to the tensions between them that began even in childhood, but I doubt their relationship was helped by the constant haranguing by the press about who was “up” and who was “down” that week, month, or year.
Olivia de Havilland was already making a name for herself in Hollywood when Joan began getting small roles in films. In a 1940 article in Motion Picture magazine, Fontaine explained how she first came to the attention of Hollywood’s power brokers:
When I first came here to be with Mother and Olivia, it seemed to me that Olivia was leading an exciting life. She was in the throes of doing Captain Blood and Anthony Adverse; things like that. I shared in it to the extent of getting up at 6 to drive her to the studio (after which I’d go back to bed) and picking her up after work. I was sort of a glorified chauffeur and second maid. Suddenly, I was offered a movie test, myself — at MGM — by George Cukor. I said to myself, “If I can have a movie career, too, why not? It ought to be fun, a sort of continuation of what I’ve been doing all my life: making believe.” So I made the test. I was seventeen, and I played a woman of thirty-five — the Other Woman, who lost Robert Montgomery to Joan Crawford in No More Ladies.
Joan, who was born in Tokyo on October 17, 1917 (her British father was an international patent attorney and the family lived in Japan during Joan and Olivia’s early childhood) described how being so sickly throughout her childhood contributed to her later movie career:
When I was a child, I was almost chronically ill. I would no sooner get over one thing than I’d have something else. I had double pneumonia. I had rheumatic fever — with a temperature of 104 for two months straight. I had a streptococcus infection of the throat, at the same time I had German measles. Doctors used to shake their heads and say they didn’t know how I managed to stay alive. But that was my secret — lying in that darkened room, too ill to do anything else, I used to daydream. I kept myself alive dreaming. In my imagination, I was well, having all kinds of adventures, leading a fantastically crowded life. Sometimes I lived in another century, but mostly I was a modern. I toured the world, I met kings and queens, I fell in love with international heroes and they fell in love with me, I did daring, dangerous, romantic, exciting things. Fascinating things happened to me constantly. I couldn’t die, you see, when I had so many things to live for!
After kicking around in the movies for several years but never making much of a splash, Fontaine got a lot of attention when she played Peggy Day in the spectacular all-female The Women, George Cukor’s wonderful 1939 film based on Clare Boothe Luce’s play featuring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and nearly every actress in residence at MGM. Only 21, Fontaine had the good fortune to be sitting next to producer David O. Selznick one night at a dinner party following the release of The Women. They started discussing Selznick’s upcoming film based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca and the producer asked Fontaine if she’d audition for the lead role of the second Mrs. de Winter. After a grueling six months of auditions, Fontaine finally won the role and received glowing reviews and an immediate bump to A-list status and an Oscar nomination (not to mention a dramatic ramp-up of the sibling rivalry stories). She didn’t win the Oscar for Rebecca, but did the following year for her role in Suspicion (her sister Olivia was famously nominated that same year for Hold Back the Dawn). But even at the height of her fame, Joan Fontaine confounded reporters with frequent statements such as, “I wouldn’t care, really, if I never made another picture. Really I wouldn’t.”
What I admire so much about Joan Fontaine in those early years of success and fame is that she refused to let it go to her head. The life lessons she learned as a sickly child in Japan and then later in Saratoga, California, and Los Angeles stayed with her despite the unbridled acclaim she was suddenly getting. They are lessons that the stars of today should read carefully. When she was named the Next Big Thing after the release of Rebecca, 22-year-old Fontaine had just married actor Brian Aherne. She was surprisingly honest and aware when she talked about the fickle nature of celebrity. She compared her newfound success with how she was treated when she first arrived in Hollywood years earlier:
Always before, I had been a person in my own right. Now, suddenly, I was nobody but “Olivia de Havilland’s younger sister.” I was dismissed as such — which was why I changed my name from Joan de Havilland to Joan Fontaine. People would come to the house, pass me by with an “Oh, hello, Joan” and rush over to Olivia and gush, “We want to tell you how marvelous you are.” I haven’t changed a bit as a person. But now, since Rebecca, they’re rushing up to me and saying, “We want to tell you how marvelous you are.” How can I be too impressed?
Her understanding of the pitfalls of fame were quite sophisticated for the day:
The glory of stardom? It’s such a shallow, transitory glory. I can’t think of it as important. There are other things so much more important to me — to any woman in her right senses. Do you know a single woman in Hollywood who has been made happy — genuinely, permanently happy — by a career? I don’t.
The first rush of success may be exciting. Climbing the Olympian heights may be a very heady experience. But, as some old Roman said, “easy is the descent into Hell.” There always comes a day when the descent has to be made. One by one, those on the heights are pushed off, to make room for others coming up. And being pushed into oblivion, if you’ve developed a taste for Olympian heights, must be a ghastly, unbearable experience.
I’m not kidding myself for one moment about why I happen to be the recipient of critics’ acclaim in Rebecca. It’s the first time they have seen me carrying a big role. I am young and new, playing opposite an established star. There is something about critics that makes them ever willing to look for a beginner to take attention away from an old hand. They’re always on the side of the underdog. Today I am a “find.” Tomorrow, other people will be newer — and they’ll get the acclaim. It always happens that way.
And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. Fontaine continued to work for many years and made wonderful films after Rebecca and Suspicion including This Above All, The Constant Nymph, Jane Eyre, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Born to Be Bad and Ivanhoe. She toured the country in plays and appeared in many television projects up until her late seventies. But armed with a rare maturity about the glittering system she was a part of, Joan Fontaine survived to the ripe old age of 96 not dependent on the approval of others like so many of her contemporaries who believed their own faded publicity. Fontaine’s marriage to Brian Aherne ended in 1945, and it was followed by three others. Her daughter, Deborah, was born in 1948 and in 1951 she adopted another girl from Peru. Sadly, Joan Fontaine’s relationship with her sister remained strained until the end but, of course, only Joan and Olivia know the real feelings that existed between the two. In a statement released yesterday, Olivia de Havilland said she was “shocked and saddened” to learn of the death of her sister and that she appreciated the many kind expressions of sympathy she has received.