In the halls of Hollywood, there have been absolutely legendary rivalries, sometimes under very high tension. This was the case between Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine; two very great actresses from the golden age of Hollywood who were also sisters.
Created by the trio Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam, Feud is a very interesting anthology series which presents a famous epic confrontation with each new season.
The first season was dedicated to a legendary rivalry between two immense stars: Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who clashed, literally and figuratively, on the set of Robert Aldrich’s extraordinary film, What’s- what happened to Baby Jane? And even off set.
There are of course other famous Hollywood relationships under very high tension. One, in particular, is all the more singular because it concerned two sisters. Two very great actresses from the golden age of Hollywood, but who had a fierce rivalry: Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.
Jealousy from childhood
The two actresses had very conflictual relationships tinged with jealousy, starting from their childhood. In his autobiography published in 1979, No Bed of RosesJoan Fontaine portrays her older sister as aggressive and abusive, capable of attempting to knowingly fracture her collarbone.
Olivia’s film career took off much earlier than her younger sister, while the latter saw herself as a “usurper”as she confided in an interview given in 1992 to a journalist (Angela Fox Dunn).
“In our family you see, Olivia was always the one who brought home the laurels, while I was the one without talent, the little sister who didn’t do much […]” she already declared with bitterness in 1949, in an interview with the hottest People and Hollywood columnist of the time, Hedda Hopper. His pen, particularly feared and regularly dipped in acid, was capable of making or breaking a career by vigorously feeding the scandal mill.
Tension escalates
It seems that relations between the two sisters soured in 1942, when they both entered competition for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Olivia for her performance in The Golden Gate, while Joan was praised for her performance in a Hitchcock film, the classic Suspicions.
It was she who won the Oscar, while her older sister had to wait until 1947 with the film To Each Their Own Destiny to win the precious statuette. Small perfidy: when she won the Oscar, a photographer immortalized the sequence where de Havilland snubbed her sister who was trying to congratulate her…
When their mother died of cancer in 1975, they stopped talking to each other. They even found ways to argue about their mother’s funeral… Fontaine claimed that her older sister had refused to invite her to the funeral, while de Havilland claimed that her sister was too busy. to come. Atmosphere… Since this date, the two sisters no longer spoke, until the death of Joan Fontaine in 2013, at the venerable age of 96 years.
Olivia will survive him for another seven years, only to die at the more than venerable and incredible age of 104, in July 2020. Not without having filed a lawsuit two years previously against Ryan Murphy and the FX channel for the series Feud, unhappy with the way she was portrayed. Don’t give up, until the end.