Joan Fontaine, the Oscar-winning actress whose film career was marked by a long-running rivalry with her sister Olivia de Havilland, has died at her home in California aged 96.
Among her most memorable films was Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion in which she co-starred with Cary Grant, for which she beat her sister to an Academy Award in 1942. De Havilland, now aged 97, lives in Paris.
Fontaine was the only actor to win an Oscar for a starring role in one of Hitchcock’s movies and the feuding sisters are the only two siblings both to win Academy Awards for acting.
The sisters were said to have stopped speaking altogether in 1975 after their mother died of cancer. Fontaine said that de Havilland had not invited her