Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine dead at 96

LOS ANGELES: Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine, one of the last of the leading ladies from Hollywood’s Golden Age whose career was marked by a storied and bitter rivalry with her older sister, Olivia de Havilland, died on Sunday at age 96.
Fontaine died in her sleep Sunday morning at her home in Carmel, California which overlooked the Pacific Ocean, after having been in failing health in recent days, said Noel Beutel, a longtime friend of the actress.
“She was an amazing woman, she had such a big heart and she will be missed,” Beutel told Reuters, adding that she had had lunch with the actress just last week.
Among Fontaine’s most memorable films in a Hollywood career spanning four decades and some four dozen films was the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Suspicion,” co-starring Cary Grant, for which she won an Academy Award in 1942, beating out her sister in the competition.
The honor gave Fontaine the distinction of being the only performer, actor or actress, ever to win an Academy Award for a starring role in one of Hitchcock’s many movies.
Fontaine appeared mousy and innocent in her early movies but later carefully selected her roles and went on to play worldly, sophisticated women in such films as “Born to be Bad and “Tender is the Night.”
She wrote in her 1978 autobiography, “No Bed of Roses,” that her sickly condition as a child actually helped develop her acting skills.