Joan Fontaine Movies and Career Information

Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917) is a British American actress. She is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, also an Academy Award winner. Along with Luise Rainer, Maureen O'Hara, Deanna Durbin and Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine is one of the last surviving leading ladies from Hollywood of the 1930s. Fontaine is the only thespian to have won 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), a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and Lilian Augusta Ruse (1886–1975), a British actress known by her stage name of Lillian Fontaine. Her parents married in 1914, and were divorced in 1919. Joan Fontaine 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. Her paternal cousin is Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, designer of the famous de Havilland Mosquito airplane. Joan Fontaine became an American citizen in April 1943. Reportedly a sickly child who developed anemia following a combined attack of the measles and a