Ours out on the looney left coast? Or... 
or Tom Laughlin's?
Posted on 12/15/2013 5:16:52 PM PST by Borges
The star of the Hitchcock classics "Suspicion" and "Rebecca" famously won an Oscar in 1942 over her bitter rival -- her older sister Olivia de Havilland.
Joan Fontaine, the polished actress who achieved stardom in the early 1940s with memorable performances in the Alfred Hitchcock films Suspicion — for which she earned the best actress Oscar over her bitter rival, sister Olivia de Havilland — and Rebecca, has died. She was 96.
THR awards analyst Scott Feinberg spoke with the actress' assistant, Susan Pfeiffer, who confirmed the death of natural causes Sunday at Fontaine's home in Carmel, Calif. Fontaine earned a third best actress Oscar nomination for her role in The Constant Nymph (1943), She also was notable as Charlotte Bronte's eponymous heroine in Jane Eyre (1944) opposite Orson Welles; in the romantic thriller September Affair (1950) with Joseph Cotton; in Ivanhoe (1952) with Robert Taylor; and in Island in the Sun (1957), where she plays a high-society woman in love with an up-and-coming politician (Harry Belafonte).
It was Hitchcock, with his penchant for “cool blondes,” who brought Fontaine to the forefront when he cast her as the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca (1940), the director’s American debut. Her performance as the new wife of Laurence Olivier in a household haunted by the death of his first wife earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. A year later, Hitchcock placed her opposite Cary Grant in Suspicion, and she won the Oscar for her turn as Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth, a shy English woman who begins to suspect her charming new husband of trying to kill her. She thus became the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film. Among those Fontaine beat out at the 1942 Academy Awards was her older sister de Havilland, up for Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Biographer Charles Higham wrote that as Fontaine came forward to accept her trophy, she rejected de Havilland’s attempt to congratulate her and that de Havilland was offended. The sisters, who never really got along since childhood, finally stopped speaking to each other in the mid-’70s. De Havilland, a two-time Oscar winner, is 97 and living in Paris.
Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland was born in Tokyo on Oct. 22, 1917, to British parents. Her father was a patent attorney who had a thriving practice in Japan. Due to the ill health of her and Olivia, their mother, Lilian, moved them to California and pushed them into acting. While de Havilland pursued acting, Fontaine returned to Tokyo and attended the American School. Ultimately, their parents divorced and Fontaine returned to the U.S. at age 17 to live in San Jose, Calif. As de Havilland was already having some success as an actress, Fontaine joined a local theater group and moved to L.A. She received a screen test at MGM and was given a bit part in No More Ladies (1935), credited as Joan Burfield. After changing her last name to Fontaine (from her stepfather, George Fontaine) to avoid confusion with her sister, she signed with RKO and garnered small parts in several movies, including The Women and Gunga Din, both released in 1939. Capitalizing on her emotional turns in Rebecca and Suspicion, Fontaine appeared in several romantic films in the ’40s, including Constant Nymph (where she falls for composer Charles Boyer), Frenchman’s Creek (1944), The Affairs of Susan (1945), From This Day Forward (1945) and Ivy (1947). Fontaine moved into more mature roles in the movies and starred on Broadway opposite Anthony Perkins in Tea and Sympathy in 1954. Her last movie appearance was in The Witches (1966). Fontaine made regular TV appearances in the late ’50s and early ’60s and served as a panelist on the game show To Tell the Truth from 1962-65. In 1986, she co-starred in the TV movie Dark Mansions and the miniseries Crossings, and her last credited performance came in the 1994 telefilm Good King Wenceslas. Fontaine was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1980 for her guest-starring stint in the soap opera Ryan’s Hope and served as jury president at the 1982 Berlin International Film Festival. In 1978, she published her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, which detailed her feud with de Havilland. Off the screen, Fontaine was a licensed pilot, an accomplished interior decorator and a Cordon Bleu-level chef who was married and divorced four times. In the ‘40s, she and William Dozier, the second of her four husbands, formed Rampart Productions, which oversaw her 1948 film Letter From an Unknown Woman, Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz (1948) starring Bing Crosby and Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) with Burt Lancaster. In 1939, Fontaine married British actor Brian Aherne, and they divorced in 1945. She was married to Batman TV show producer Dozier from 1946-51, to producer Collier Young from 1952-61 and to journalist Alfred Wright Jr. from 1964-69.
“I would say that the only way you could have contradictory evidence is from personal experience.”
Coming from someone that interloped in a conversation they weren’t included in; someone that seems to be obsessed with a fictional character’s proclivities. Hmmm...
You should come out of the closet; you’ll have more room for your clothes.
And the same for you as well....Buddy!!!
You posted something idiotic about a fictional character being gay who really wasn’t gay. Further posting something stupid about smelling his vaseline trail or some such stupid thing all on a pulbicly read thread. You have problems that can’t be solved in a few posts. I hope you get help.
Speaking of Matthew Broderick, when he hosts on TCM, he seems totally uninterested. As an actor, I would think he could at least pretend to care.
Never cared for her, either.
One enormous problem with Leslie Howard playing Ashley Wilkes is that he was too old for the role.
The guy’s had one or good flicks: Wargames and Ferris Bueller; he’s lived off of those for 30 years now...
He was great in “Election”, like Ferris getting a taste of his own medicine in how he treated the poor principal.
I watched ~half of that “film”...bleh.
Khent disapproves.
I went to check his film credits. I actually saw the first film he ever made in the theater 30 years ago, “Max Dugan Returns”, with the great Jason Robards, which was a nice little film he did prior to “WarGames”
Aside from “Election”, which was made in 1999, almost everything he’s been in since has been total rubbish (aside from, perhaps, “The Producers” musical). The last major film he was in was “Tower Heist”, and that was execrable (and yet another Eddie Murphy fiasco, who has had an even worse streak than Broderick).
I never saw “Max Dugan Returns”.
“Tower Heist”: A friend of mine said: “You gotta see it, Eddie’s back!” I watched ~3/4 of it (didn’t see the ending) - garbage.
Ben Stiller’s trending into the mix of back streak actors too.
Gabourey Sidibe was amusing in it, even if the material was beneath her. They should put her in more comedies, especially if they ever decide to do “Saint Skittles: The Musical”, playing our favorite corpulent low IQ’d trial star witness, Rachel Jeantel. She could do the show stopper, “Crackas and da cursive are da old skool.” It’ll get her a second Oscar nomination, I can just feel it.
OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
U 1 cray mofo!!! Dat whak!!!
Me and Khent LOVE it!!!
One other small aside, Margaret Mitchell was supposed to have modeled the part of Scarlett O’Hara on Teddy Rosevelts mother, the Southern Belle Martha Bulloch. Being that his father Teddy Sr. was an ardent abolitionists, I’ve often wondered how some of those conversations must have gone.
Martha’s brother (James Dunwoody Bulloch) was a civil war confederate who ran guns and supplies from England to the south during the war. After the war, he was banned from ever coming back to the U.S. Does that not sound a lot like what Rhett did during the Civil War? I’ve always wondered if there was a little inspiration there also. Incidentally, many of Teddy’s biographies have identified him as one of Teddy’s idols and gave him a love of the navy.
I always wondered at what point did the native accents brought over from England, Scotland, et al, start to morph into what we’ve heard in the past century, and specifically what those folks in the mid-19th century (and before) truly sounded like.
I’ve read claims that English accents as we know them today were flatter and more “American” sounding 200 years ago, but without recordings, it’s hard to prove. I remember how shocked I was to hear Southern-raised Woodrow Wilson’s voice, which has virtually none of the characteristics one would typically associate (and he spent time in both GA & SC).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb30L-NmKjo
Of course, whether anyone of that era sounded like Leslie Howard being raised outside of Atlanta, well, probably unlikely.
Yes, Bulloch does sound like a model for Rhett Butler. I always thought it seemed a bit dubious that the Union soldiers (as portrayed in the film) would’ve been nearly as cordial towards someone of Butler’s “profession” in reality (and indeed, more than likely would have had him hanged).
Ours out on the looney left coast? Or... or Tom Laughlin's?
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