Joan Fontaine: The 1942 Oscar Winner Who Never Spoke to Sister Olivia Again
- Won Best Actress Oscar in 1942 while ignoring sister Olivia de Havilland in front row
- Only actor ever to win Academy Award for a Hitchcock-directed film
- Lifelong rivalry lasted 71 years; sisters died 7 years apart (96 and 104)
On February 26, 1942, when Joan Fontaine collected the Best Actress Oscar for Suspicion, she became the only performer in history—male or female—to win an Academy Award for a leading role in an Alfred Hitchcock picture.
Yet the moment that should have crowned her career instead froze a family fracture forever.
As she crossed the Biltmore Bowl stage, she walked directly past Olivia de Havilland seated in the front row. No nod. No glance. No words.
The two British-born sisters, who together earned four acting Oscars and twenty nominations across four decades, never exchanged another sentence for the remaining seventy-one years of their lives.
Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland on October 22, 1917, in Tokyo to British parents, Joan arrived fifteen months after Olivia on July 1, 1916.
Their father Walter abandoned the family in 1919; their mother Lillian moved the girls to Saratoga, California, where they shared a bedroom under strict discipline.
Joan later described chronic respiratory illnesses met with indifference while Olivia received praise and extra lessons.
One childhood fight allegedly ended with Joan’s collarbone broken by Olivia; another incident involved an attempt to push the sick younger sister from bed.
Whether exaggerated or exact, these memories shaped Joan’s conviction that she was “the family scapegoat.”
By 1934 both sisters chased acting in California. Olivia signed with Warner Bros. and rocketed to fame as Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939), a role that brought her first Best Supporting Actress nomination and worldwide recognition.
Joan, determined to escape the shadow, adopted her stepfather George Fontaine’s surname in 1937.
David O. Selznick tested her for Rebecca opposite Laurence Olivier. Although Selznick initially dismissed her as “too coy,” Hitchcock saw something different: a refined exterior masking unpredictable steel.
Rebecca earned Joan her first Best Actress nomination in 1941 at age twenty-three, making the de Havilland sisters the only siblings ever nominated for acting Oscars in the same year (Olivia for Hold Back the Dawn).
The 1942 ceremony became legend. Ten nominees competed in the Best Actress category, including Bette Davis and Greer Garson.
When presenter Dudley Nichols announced “Joan Fontaine – Suspicion,” cameras captured Olivia sitting motionless.
Joan later wrote in her 1978 memoir No Bed of Roses that she “froze mid-aisle,” unsure whether protocol demanded a curtsy.
She accepted the statuette, delivered a brief speech, and returned to her table without acknowledging her sister.
The following day newspapers splashed the non-interaction across front pages, cementing the narrative of Hollywood’s most glamorous blood feud.
Joan’s victory carried historic weight. Suspicion marked Hitchcock’s first Oscar win of any kind (he would wait until 1967 for the Irving G. Thalberg Award).
Joan remains the sole acting winner across his fifty-three features.
She followed with strong roles in The Constant Nymph (1943, another nomination), Jane Eyre (1943) opposite Orson Welles, and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), now regarded as one of the finest performances in Max Ophüls’s canon.
Between 1940 and 1950 she appeared in twenty major films, commanded top billing at RKO and Universal, and earned a reputation for doing her own stunts, including a dangerous horseback sequence in Frenchman’s Creek (1944).
Olivia, meanwhile, won her own Best Actress Oscars for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), bringing the family total to three statuettes before age thirty-three.
The sisters’ combined eight nominations in nine years (1939–1947) remain unmatched by any sibling pair.
Yet professional triumph never softened personal distance. They refused joint interviews.
When their mother Lillian died of cancer in 1975, Joan claimed Olivia withheld news of the funeral; Olivia insisted Joan had already severed contact.
Court documents from Olivia’s 2017 lawsuit against FX over Feud confirm the estrangement persisted into extreme old age.
Joan married four times: actor Brian Aherne (1939–1945), producer William Dozier (1946–1951), writer-producer Collier Young (1952–1961), and journalist Alfred Wright, Jr. (1964–1969).
She gave birth to daughter Deborah Leslie in 1948 and adopted a Peruvian girl, Martita, in 1951.
After semi-retirement in the 1960s she bred prize-winning Corgi dogs, appeared occasionally on Broadway (Tea and Sympathy, 1954) and television (The Love Boat, Cannon), and published her candid memoir at age sixty-one.
Critics often reduced her to “the fragile Hitchcock blonde,” yet colleagues described a different woman.
Cinematographer Robert Krasker noted she could reset her own lighting when dissatisfied.
Director George Cukor called her “quietly ferocious.” She turned down the lead in The Paradine Case because she refused to play second fiddle to anyone again, even on screen.
When agents urged more “sex appeal,” she fired them. Her on-screen tremor—mastered in Rebecca and perfected in Suspicion—was technique, not temperament.
By the 1980s both sisters lived quietly within thirty miles of each other in Northern California yet never crossed paths.
Joan moved to a Carmel villa surrounded by her dogs; Olivia maintained a Paris residence and a meticulous archive that now resides at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library.
When journalists asked Joan about reconciliation in her nineties, she replied with characteristic bite: “You can’t make peace with someone who’s still fighting a war.”
Olivia reached 104, dying peacefully in Paris on July 26, 2020. Joan had preceded her on December 15, 2013, at her Carmel home at age ninety-six.
The Academy’s In Memoriam reel that year played clips of both sisters in the same segment, a juxtaposition neither woman lived to see.
Their story still captivates because it refuses easy moralizing.
Two women born during World War I outlived almost every peer, collected four Oscars between them, worked with Hitchcock, Wyler, and Selznick, and shaped the template of the psychological heroine.
Yet they carried childhood wounds into the twenty-first century with the same intensity they brought to sound stages in 1939.
Joan Fontaine did not merely survive Hollywood’s golden era. She seized her name, her roles, and her moment on that 1942 stage while the cameras rolled and her sister watched in silence.
The price was absolute independence at the cost of absolute estrangement.
She paid it without apology, proving that some victories are measured not by applause but by the strength required to walk past the front row and never look back.
