The forties saw Joan Fontaine’s fortune changed after she got the role of the unnamed heroine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) alongside Laurence Olivier. The film opened to critical acclaims and earned Fontaine her first Academy Award nomination. She would again be nominated, and this time won, for her role in Suspicion (1941), another Hitchcock-directed film. She received her third and final Oscar nomination for The Constant Nymph (1943).
1941. (Ernest Bachrach)
Though an established star in Hollywood, Fontaine was often typecast in female melodrama. “They seemed to want to make me cry the whole Atlantic,” she once said. Her other notable films in this decade including This Above All (1942), Jane Eyre (1943), Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), and The Emperor Waltz (1948). Fontaine also worked as a nurse’s aide every now and then during the war.
Take a look back at the actress when she was young in the 1940s:
On the set of ‘Rebecca’ with Laurence Olivier and Alfred Hitchcock, 1940. (Sunset Boulevard)
A scene from ‘Rebecca’ with Laurence Olivier, 1940. (Hulton)
1940. (Silver Screen Collection)
A still for ‘Suspicion’ with Cary Grant, 1941. (Bettmann)
Leave a Reply