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Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, known professionally as Joan Fontaine, was a British-American actress. Fontaine began her career on the stage in 1935 and signed a contract with RKO Pictures that same year.
In 1941, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her role in Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The following year, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Hitchcock's Suspicion, making Fontaine the only actor to ever win an Academy Award in a film directed by Hitchcock. Fontaine and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland are the only set of siblings to have won lead acting Academy Awards. During the 1940s to the 1990s, Fontaine continued her career in roles on the stage and in radio, television and film. She released her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978. After a career spanning over fifty years, Fontaine made her last on-screen appearance in 1994.
Born in Japan to British parents, the sisters moved to California in 1919. Fontaine lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where she owned a home, Villa Fontana. It was there that she died of natural causes at the age of 96 in 2013.
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