Joan Fontaine, the polished actress who achieved stardom in the early 1940s with memorable performances in the Alfred Hitchcock films Suspicion — for which she earned the best actress Oscar over her bitter rival, sister Olivia de Havilland — and Rebecca, has died. She was 96.

THR awards analyst Scott Feinberg spoke with the actress' assistant, Susan Pfeiffer, who confirmed the death of natural causes Sunday at Fontaine's home in Carmel, Calif.

Fontaine earned a third best actress Oscar nomination for her role in The Constant Nymph (1943), She also was notable as Charlotte Bronte's eponymous heroine in Jane Eyre (1944) opposite Orson Welles; in the romantic thriller September Affair (1950) with Joseph Cotton; in Ivanhoe (1952) with Robert Taylor; and in Island in the Sun (1957), where she plays a high-society woman in love with an up-and-coming politician (Harry Belafonte).

It was Hitchcock, with his penchant for “cool blondes,” who brought Fontaine to the forefront when he cast her as the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca (1940), the director’s American debut. Her performance as the new wife of Laurence Olivier in a household haunted by the death of his first wife earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress.

A year later, Hitchcock placed her opposite Cary Grant in Suspicion, and she won the Oscar for her turn as Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth, a shy English woman who begins to suspect her charming new husband of trying to kill her. She thus became the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film.

I hope you are not casting an aspersion on me. Because I am long on record as a fan of Rebecca.

:Reads Wikipedia listing for Joan Fontaine. Posts: "R.I.P. Joan Fontaine" to Facebook to get attention. Masturbates to the "likes" received.:

Gott ist tot.

:Reads Wikipedia listing for Joan Fontaine. Posts: "R.I.P. Joan Fontaine" to Facebook to get attention. Masturbates to the "likes" received.:

Gott ist tot.