Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine, who rose to fame during Hollywood's golden age as the star of several Alfred Hitch.cock classics, died from natural causes at her home in Carmel, northern California on December 16, 2013 aged 96, US media reports said. Born in Japan to British parents, Fontaine moved in 1919 to California, where she and her elder sister -screen idol Olivia de Havilland-were to shape successful movie careers.Fontaine and de Havilland remain the only sisters to have won lead actress honours at the Academy Awards.Yet the two sisters also had an uneasy relationship, with Fontaine recording a bitter competition in her own account "No Bed of Roses ". Fontaine began her acting career in her late teens with Largely less important roles on the stage and later in mostly B-movies in the 1930s. It was not before famous British film director Hitchcock spotted her a decade later that her career took off. Greatly surprised by her expressive looks, the suspense   master cast Fontaine in his first US film, a 1940 adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel "Rebecca". She received an Academy Award nomination  for her performance as a troubled wife. A year later, Fontaine finally won the long-sought golden figure, for her role as leading lady in "Suspicion" opposite Cary Grant, becoming the first and only actress to earn the title for a Hitchock film. Although her sister, Olivia de Havilland, preceded her in gaining Hollywood fame, Fontaine was the first of the sisters to win an Oscar, beating Olivia's nomination as best actress in Mitchell Leisen's "Hold Back the Dawn". The dislike ,between the sisters was felt at the Oscars ceremony."I froze. I stared across the table, where Olivia was sitting.'Get up there!' she whispered commandingly," Fontaine said."All the dislike we'd felt toward each other as children...all came rushing back in quickly changing pictures...I felt Olivia would spring across the table and seize me by the hair." Olivia did not win her first Oscar until 1946, for her role as the lover of a World War I pilot in Leisen's " To Each His Own". Fontaine later made it known that her. sister had slighted her as she attempted to offer congratulations."She took one look at me, ignored my hand, seized her Oscar and wheeled away," she said. The sisters were also reportedly competitors in love. Howard Hughes, a strange businessman who dated the elder de Havilland for a time, offered marriage to Fontaine several times."I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she'll undoubtedly be extremely angry because I beat her to it!" Fontaine once joked. As her film career fruited in the 1950s, Fontaine turned to television and dinner theatre, and also appeared in several Broadway productions, including  the Lion in Winter". Anything but the ordinary lady, Fontaine was also a licensed pilot, a champion balloonist, an accomplished golfer, a licensed .decoration designer and a first-class cook. The dislike between Fontaine and Olivia began when they  _  .
competed for an Oscar competed for a husband were small children were successful actresses