Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917) is a British American actress. She became an American citizen in April 1943. She is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, also an Academy Award winner. Along with Luise Rainer, Gloria Stuart, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin and Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine is one of the last surviving female stars from Hollywood of the 1930s. She is notably the only actress to ever win an Academy Award for a perfo...
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Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917) is a British American actress. She became an American citizen in April 1943. She is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, also an Academy Award winner. Along with Luise Rainer, Gloria Stuart, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin and Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine is one of the last surviving female stars from Hollywood of the 1930s. She is notably the only actress to ever win an Academy Award for a performance in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
She was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in Tokyo, Japan, the younger daughter of Walter Augustus de Havilland (1872-1968), and Lilian Augusta Ruse (1886-1975), a British actress known by her stage name of Lilian Fontaine, who married in 1914, and divorced in 1919. Walter was a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan. She is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland (b. 1916), from whom she has been estranged for many decades, not speaking at all since 1975. They both attended...
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