Joan Fontaine dead at 96

Having just covered the death of Eleanor Parker last week, and also with the great Peter O'Toole dying on Saturday, it is with sadness that I today briefly revisit another absolute star of the much missed Beautiful Women thread, and also a great star from Hollywood's golden age, Joan Fontaine. She died yesterday of natural causes.

I came to admire her only recently, revisiting films by Hitchcock I had long admired like Vertigo, and realizing how much of his work I had not seen. But it was actually that and a first viewing of Jane Eyre with Orson Welles, where Joan stole the picture from Welles, that triggered my interest in her career. This led me to Hitchcock's Rebecca, his only film to win an Oscar, and for which Joan got her first Oscar nomination, followed by Suspicion the next year, for which she did win the Oscar, pictured above, the only time an actor won an Oscar in one of Hitch's films. Both are spectacular performances, and i have since seen several other of her films, although her career petered out through the fifties. Some claim this was the nefarious work of Howard Hughes, who she claims she refused several marriage offers from.

Pictures of Joan Fontaine, as great as they are, do not do her great beauty justice. One must see her move, her expressions change, and even her voice all go together. The first of Hitchcock's cool blondes, she also had a hard to coordinate elegance combined with approachableness. But she also, as in Rebecca, could merge an appealing vulnerability with a strength of character and intelligence. There was and has since been no one like her, and almost certainly never will be.

 

Hm. Well, like I said my first film of hers was Jane Eyre, which frankly I probably would not have tried other than that it had Orson Welles in it. As an adaptation of a Nineteenth Century English novel, it would not be a film of universal appeal, although other than Joan Fontaine's great performance it is also notable for having a brief role for a very young Elizabeth Taylor.

And a later film by Fontaine called Letter from an Unknown Woman was putatively her favorite. Also excellent, but rather, uh, European? I don't think it would be my first of hers.

In any event her best known films are the ones she did with Hitchcock, Rebecca and Suspicion. Both are mysteries, but there is in Rebecca a noticeable element verging on horror. For Hitchcock many of course know him for Psycho, clearly a horror picture (with a heavy psychological element), and The Birds, also broadly a horror film. But most of his films were not horror films. Rebecca, though, does have its eery moments. Suspicion is also a great film, but of the two I would say Rebecca makes perhaps the better, and a great, first film with Joan to see.

Rebecca also has an exceptional supporting cast in addition to Larry Olivier in the male lead. George Sanders is a real hoot, as is Judith Anderson. You won't be sorry.