Three women born in Japan have won Oscars for acting; Joan Fontaine and her sister are two of them. As it happens, I’m not as upset as a lot of people that the Oscars don’t award foreign-language films much outside their own category; after all, the Academy was created to be about American film. (And to prevent the studios from being unionized, which did not work out particularly well, but anyway.) But there have been, in the Academy’s history, more than a few people who have done outstanding work in American films while being, you know, born outside the United States, and it’s a little disheartening that in this case you have better luck being the child of a lawyer who just happened to be working in Japan than to actually be Japanese.

I don’t intend to mention her sister by name, because reading between the lines, about half the problem here is that there was personal and professional rivalry between them. Joan was actually born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, but she took her stepfather’s last name so as to separate her career from her sister’s. (Whose idea that was, as is true of so much else in their relationship, depends on whom you ask.) Joan believed her sister was their mother’s favourite child and that her sister had been jealous of her pretty much from the day she was born, it seems, and maybe that’s true. I don’t know.

What I do know is that their mother had hoped to have an acting career of her own, before she married Walter de Havilland, and her daughters basically took her dream for their own. I’ve only seen a few of Joan’s movies, but she definitely had the talent to make a career. She is the only person to have won an Oscar for appearing in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock—and while it is generally considered to be a sympathy win for having lost the previous year, well, she lost for Rebecca. To Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle, which is not a bad movie but is no Rebecca. Honestly, I’m not sure Ginger Rogers was the weakest nominee of the year, but she sure didn’t deserve to win.

And I mean, Suspicion has never been my favourite Hitchcock—Cary Grant was frankly miscast, a bit like casting Paul Rudd in a role where you weren’t sure if he was a murderer or not—but Joan definitely wasn’t a weak link. I’ll admit I’m honestly inclined toward Barbara Stanwyck, in part because of a fondness for Barbara Stanwyck and in part because comedy isn’t given enough awards, but the movies I’ve seen from that year are a solid slate and any one of the five would likely have been an acceptable choice. And it was Joan Fontaine’s only win, though Barbara Stanwyck never won a competitive Oscar at all?

It amuses me that Joan (who I refer to by first name here because of the whole “stage name” issue) claimed to have been the first choice for the role of Melanie Wilkes and didn’t get the part because George Cukor thought she was too stylish. She said she recommended her sister. But that does rather mean that both women are probably best known for roles where they played quiet, dowdy women. After all, isn’t the whole point of the nameless Second Mrs. DeWinter that she’s quiet and dowdy and can’t compare to the first one, the dead Rebecca? Such an appropriate role for a woman so long defined by her rivalry, though her rival remains alive, even now.

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