Joan Fontaine

Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland (born 22 October 1917), known professionally as Joan Fontaine, is a British American actress. She and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland are two of the last surviving leading ladies from Hollywood of the 1930s, at ages 94 and 95 respectively. Fontaine is the only actress to have won an Academy Award for a performance in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Suspicion. She was born in Tokyo, Fontaine is the younger daughter of Walter Augustus de Havilland, a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and Lillian Augusta Ruse, a British actress known by her stage name of Lillian Fontaine. Her parents married in 1914, and were divorced in April 1925. Joan Fontaine is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland. Her paternal cousin was Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, designer of the famous de Havilland Mosquito aeroplane. Fontaine became an American citizen in April 1943. Reportedly a sickly child who developed anaemia following a combined attack of the measles and a streptococcal infection, her mother moved her and her sister to the United States upon the advice of a physician.


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