Academy
Award-winning actress Joan Fontaine, who found stardom playing naive
wives in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Rebecca and
also was featured in films by Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Nicholas
Ray, died Sunday. She was 96.
Fontaine,
the sister of fellow Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland, died in her
sleep in her Carmel, California, home Sunday morning, said longtime
friend Noel Beutel. Fontaine had been fading in recent days and died
“peacefully,” Beutel said.
In
her later years, Fontaine had lived quietly at her Villa Fontana
estate south of Carmel, enjoying its spectacular view of wind-swept
Point Lobos.
“I’ve flown in an international balloon race. I’ve piloted my own plane. I’ve ridden to the hounds. I’ve done a lot of exciting things”
Fontaine’s
pale, soft features and frightened stare made her ideal for melodrama
and she was a major star for much of the 1940s. For Hitchcock, she
was a prototype of the uneasy blondes played by Kim Novak
in Vertigo and
Tippi Hedren in The
Birdsand Marnie.
The director would later say he was most impressed by Fontaine’s
restraint. She would credit George Cukor, who directed her in The
Women,
for urging her to “think and feel and the rest will take care of
itself.”
Fontaine
appeared in more than 30 movies, including early roles in The
Women andGunga
Din,
the title part in Jane
Eyre and
in Max Ophuls’ historical drama Letter
from an Unknown Woman.
She was also in films directed by Wilder (The
Emperor Waltz),
Lang (Beyond
a Reasonable Doubt)
and, wised up and dangerous, in Ray’s Born
to be Bad.
She starred on Broadway in 1954 in Tea
and Sympathy and
in 1980 received an Emmy nomination for her cameo on the daytime
soap Ryan’s
Hope.
Source:
nationalpost
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