The news arrived in Paris, where Olivia de Havilland had lived for years. Her younger sister, Joan, was dead. Joan had passed away at ninety-six in her home in Carmel Highlands, California, closing the curtain on the longest and most publicly documented sibling feud Hollywood had ever produced. The struggle had begun in a shared childhood bedroom in the 1920s and had persisted, in various forms, for nearly nine decades.
Now Olivia released a statement expressing genuine sorrow at the loss of her little sister. Observers who had tracked the family story for decades noted that it was one of the kindest, most emotional public statements either sister had ever made about the other. A small but meaningful gesture of reconciliation, offered only after any direct resolution between them had become impossible. Olivia would live nearly seven more years, passing away in 2020 at one hundred four, one of the last great stars of Hollywood’s golden age.
Joan had been born into competition. She came into the world in Tokyo on October 22, 1917, the second daughter of Walter de Havilland, a British patent lawyer, and his wife Lilian. Arriving just fifteen months after her older sister, Joan was raised in permanent closeness with Olivia. The girls shared a bedroom and, soon enough, a level of rivalry that would shape both their lives for nearly a century.
Their years in Tokyo as the children of expatriate Britons gave them an unusual childhood inside a small, tight-knit community of foreign families, but that international life was cut short. Their parents divorced while Joan was still very young, and the sisters moved with their mother to California. There Lilian, a former stage actress, married George Fontaine, a store manager. Joan would eventually borrow her stage surname from this stepfather, a choice tied from its outset to the complicated dynamic between the sisters.
The move from Japan to California was an enormous shift for two girls still adjusting to their parents’ separation, uprooted to a new environment three thousand miles from their father, who remained in Japan for much of their early childhood. Lilian de Havilland, according to those who watched the family over the years, played an active and possibly deliberate role in fostering rivalry between her daughters at an early age. Whether through favoritism, genuine differences in how she treated each girl, or a calculated effort to push them toward excellence, her parenting style planted the seeds of a competition that intensified with every passing year. As small children, the sisters began physically fighting each other with a level of violence far beyond ordinary sibling squabbles.
By the time Joan was nine, according to a widely repeated account later published in Life magazine, her frustration with her older sister had grown so great that she devised a careful plan, fortunately never carried out, to let Olivia strike her several times before delivering a decisive response. The story may have gained embellishment over the years, but it reflected the fierce and physical nature of the rivalry long before either girl imagined they would become two of the most famous actresses in American cinema. Those competitive foundations followed them directly into Hollywood. Olivia was the first to break into acting professionally, landing a role as a teenager in a major film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream while still eighteen.
Her breakthrough put her firmly on the path to stardom, well ahead of her younger sister. Watching this early success, Joan decided to pursue the same profession and reportedly turned directly to Olivia for help getting started. The choice to follow in her sister’s footsteps rather than seek a completely different career has long puzzled those who studied the family. Instead of moving away from direct comparison, Joan seemed determined to compete on the same terms Olivia had already staked out.
Olivia agreed to help her younger sister on one condition: that Joan change her professional name to avoid any confusion with her rapidly rising career. Joan complied, taking Fontaine as her surname from her stepfather. Reports from the period indicate Olivia was not enthusiastic about her sister’s path, and their already strained relationship grew more complicated as both women seriously competed for attention within the same industry. Joan’s early career struggled to advance.
While Olivia achieved rapid success, including a famous and ongoing on-screen pairing with Errol Flynn in a series of adventure films, Joan’s early attempts faltered by comparison, including an unsuccessful effort with Fred Astaire that did little to establish her as a talent in her own right. During this difficult early period, Joan reportedly found herself in the awkward position of driving her more successful older sister to and from the studio, a daily reminder of the widening gap between their careers. For a young woman already bearing years of sibling rivalry, that routine must have held particular bitterness, an inescapable reminder of their respective standings. The gap did not remain wide for long.
In 1940, Joan was chosen to star in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, playing a shy, anxious young woman who marries a wealthy widower and struggles to feel confident in the shadow of his deceased first wife. The role required Joan to convincingly portray a level of insecurity and self-doubt that suited her talents remarkably well at that stage of her career. What audiences and critics did not know was how deliberately Hitchcock engineered the emotional conditions on set to extract that fragile, anxious performance from his young star. The film, adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel, told the story of an unnamed young woman who marries into an aristocratic English family and finds herself constantly compared to her husband’s first wife, a glamorous and mysterious woman who died under circumstances the household seemed unwilling to discuss.
It was a role built almost entirely on insecurity, self-doubt, and a persistent sense of not belonging, qualities that, whether by chance or deliberate design, matched the emotional state Joan was already experiencing after years of professional comparison to her more famous sister. According to accounts that emerged in later years, Hitchcock told Joan during filming that the rest of the cast and crew personally hated her, a manipulative tactic designed to heighten her feelings of isolation and anxiety in a way that would translate directly to the screen. It was an unusual and ethically controversial directing method, but by most accounts it worked exactly as Hitchcock intended, earning Joan her first of three consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. Rebecca marked the true beginning of Joan’s rise as a major Hollywood star.
The film’s enormous success meant that, for the first time, she was mentioned in the same context as Olivia in terms of real stardom. Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year, and Joan’s central performance was widely considered one of the main reasons for its lasting critical and commercial success. The following year, 1941, Joan starred in another Hitchcock thriller, Suspicion, playing a woman who becomes increasingly convinced that her charming husband may be planning to kill her. The performance would bring her the greatest professional triumph of her career, and it set the stage for one of the most awkward and discussed moments in Academy Awards history.
At the 1942 Oscar ceremony in February, Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland both found themselves nominated in the same category, Best Actress, marking the first time in Academy history that sisters directly competed for the same award. Joan was nominated for her stunning performance in Suspicion, while Olivia was nominated for her work in Hold Back the Dawn. Life magazine had published an article that year about the strange dynamic between the two women, coolly observing that there was no danger of any sudden flow of sisterly affection interrupting either woman’s competition or professional ambition. Of more than a hundred photographs taken during the shoot, the sisters appeared together in only a few.
When Joan’s name was announced as the winner, she became, at twenty-four, the youngest actress to win the Best Actress Oscar in the history of the awards up to that time. It should have been one of the proudest moments of her career. Instead, according to witnesses, the moment was overshadowed by the palpable tensions between the sisters, with observers noting the charged, uncomfortable atmosphere as Joan accepted her award while her older sister watched. That tension surfaced more dramatically five years later.
In 1947, when Olivia won her first Oscar for To Each His Own, Joan reportedly tried to approach her sister backstage in a gesture of reconciliation, extending her hand toward Olivia. According to the most common accounts of the incident, Olivia completely ignored her sister’s outstretched hand and walked past her without any acknowledgment. A public humiliation witnessed by many, it became one of the most defining and referenced moments in the long history of their rivalry. Olivia herself later offered a somewhat different explanation for the tension, suggesting in a rare 1957 interview that the coldness in her relationship with Joan stemmed from a cruel remark Joan had once made about Olivia’s first husband.
Whatever the exact origin, the backstage incident at the 1947 ceremony crystallized the rivalry into something the public could point to directly. The rivalry extended far beyond professional achievement. According to Joan’s later accounts, the sisters found themselves attracted to some of the same men over the years, including at one point the notorious aviator and producer Howard Hughes, adding another layer of personal competition to a relationship already strained by years of professional rivalry. Both sisters also married multiple times over the following decades, though neither found the lasting romantic stability that might have offered some relief.
Joan married four times, beginning with British actor Brian Aherne in August 1939. The marriage lasted less than six years, ending in divorce in 1945. A little over a year after that divorce was finalized, Joan married producer and writer William Dozier in May 1946. They had a daughter, Deborah Leslie, born in November 1948, the only biological child Joan would have.
That marriage also proved short-lived, with the couple separating a year after Deborah’s birth and Joan filing for divorce on grounds of desertion, a process not completed until January 1951. Dozier himself went on to a prominent career in television production, eventually creating and narrating the famous Batman series in the 1960s. Joan’s third marriage, in November 1952, was to producer and writer Collier Young. It lasted much longer than her first two, continuing for about eight years before the couple separated in 1960, with the divorce finalized in early 1961.
During this marriage, in 1952, Joan formally adopted a young Peruvian girl named Martha, whom she had met a year earlier while visiting the Inca ruins in South America, where the child’s father worked as a guard. Joan’s fourth and final marriage, in January 1964, was to Alfred Wright Jr. , a sports journalist who worked as golf editor for Sports Illustrated. That marriage also failed to withstand the test of time, ending in divorce in 1969.
Joan’s relationships with her children ultimately revealed a troubling pattern of estrangement that seemed in some ways to mirror the sisterly dynamics of her childhood. Her adopted daughter Martha ran away from home around the age of seventeen, beginning a permanent rift between mother and daughter that was never fully repaired. Joan never publicly revealed the circumstances of Martha’s departure in detail. Her biological daughter Deborah, who pursued a career in the entertainment industry, also became estranged from her mother over the years.
In her later decades, Joan found herself distant from both daughters she had raised, as well as from the sister with whom she had been in conflict nearly her whole life. Those closest to Joan in her final years often noted the contrast between her elegant, composed public persona and her deeply complicated relationships with the people closest to her. The final break came over their aging mother. By the mid-1970s, Lilian, mother of Joan and Olivia, was elderly, and in 1975 she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
The circumstances surrounding their mother’s final illness and death produced the largest and most consequential rift in the sisters’ already strained relationship. According to most accounts, the sisters had developed entirely different views on how best to care for their mother as her health declined. Olivia reportedly traveled to be at their mother’s side in her final days and stayed with her until the end. Joan’s own account of those final weeks painted a very different picture.
According to Joan’s later account, her sister never told her of their mother’s death; she learned of it through indirect channels. Olivia offered a different version of events, indicating that Joan simply chose not to attend their mother’s memorial service. Whatever the exact sequence, the consequences were unambiguous. From 1975 onward, the break between Joan and Olivia was permanent and final.
At a 1979 gathering honoring past Oscar winners, organizers reportedly seated the sisters at opposite ends of the stage, an arrangement intended to avoid any public confrontation. A decade later, in 1989, when both sisters were invited to another Oscar ceremony and discovered they had been assigned adjacent hotel rooms, Joan reportedly asked to change rooms rather than remain near her sister. That ceremony proved to be the last one Joan personally attended. As Joan aged, her public statements about the rivalry took on a tone of increasing dismissal and perhaps bewilderment.
In a particularly candid interview during the 1980s, Joan said that an estrangement could be just like a marriage, adding that she did not see her sister at all and had no intention of changing that. Yet in other public statements, especially later in life, Joan seemed to soften her characterization considerably. At times she hinted that the sisters had never actually quarreled, that the rivalry was merely the product of decades of press speculation. Olivia, for her part, remained largely silent on the subject, offering occasional carefully measured comments.
In a rare interview around her one hundredth birthday, Olivia said an estrangement implied sustained hostile behavior between two parties and stated she could not recall initiating any hostile behavior toward her sister, while acknowledging she sometimes responded defensively to what she described as deliberate and unkind acts directed at her. However they chose to describe their relationship publicly, the practical reality remained unchanged for nearly four full decades. The two women who once shared a childhood bedroom spent most of their adult lives maintaining a careful, deliberate distance from each other. In an interview conducted earlier in 2013, just months before her death, Joan again downplayed the entire conflict, insisting that she and Olivia had never quarreled and had never exchanged a single harsh word.
When news of Joan’s death reached Olivia, her public statement expressed genuine grief, one of the kindest statements either sister had ever made about the other. Entertainment writers who had spent decades documenting their interactions noted the irony clearly. It had taken the death of one sister to produce the warmest public words from the other in nearly forty years. In a striking moment of frankness shortly before her own hundredth birthday, Olivia reportedly referred to her late sister by a particularly harsh private name, reflecting how poor she considered their relationship to be even decades after Joan’s death.
Joan Fontaine’s life, from a competitive childhood in a shared bedroom, through an exceptional acting career that included an Oscar won before the age of twenty-four, through four marriages and complicated relationships with her two daughters, revealed a consistent pattern. Her career brought enormous public acclaim, while her personal life was repeatedly marked by distance and estrangement from the people who should have been closest to her. In many ways, her own story echoed the roles that made her famous: the anxious young bride in Rebecca, the uncertain wife in Suspicion.
Most poignantly, it mirrored the quiet loneliness she had spent her career convincing audiences she felt.