***Vintage***

Vintage ~ Hollywood ~ Movies ~ Actors ~ Photo!!!

Vintage B/W Real Photo Hollywood Movie Actress JOAN FONTAINE STILL PHOTOGRAPH

Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917) is a British American actress. She became an American citizen in April 1943. She is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland, also an Academy Award winner. Along with Luise Rainer, Gloria Stuart, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin and Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine is one of the last surviving female stars from Hollywood of the 1930s. She is notably the only actress to ever win 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), and Lilian Augusta Ruse (1886-1975), a British actress known by her stage name of Lilian Fontaine, who married in 1914, and divorced in 1919. Walter was a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan. She 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. They both attended Los Gatos High School and the Notre Dame Convent Roman Catholic girls school in Belmont, California. Her paternal cousin is Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, designer of the famous de Havilland Mosquito airplane.

Joan was a sickly child who developed anemia following a combined attack of the measles and a streptococcic infection. Upon the advice of a physician, Joan's mother moved her and her sister to the United States where they settled in the town of Saratoga, California.

Joan's health improved dramatically and she was soon taking diction lessons along with her sister. She was also an extremely bright child and scored 160 on an intelligence test when she was three When she was fifteen, Joan returned to Japan and lived with her father for two years.Joan made her stage debut in the West Coast production of Call It A Day in 1935 and was soon signed to an RKO contract. In later life she appeared on Broadway in Forty Carrots.