Few Hollywood rivalries have been as bitter, or as long-lasting, as that between legendary sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.
Joan was the younger sister by just 15 months and their rivalry started in childhood. Olivia reportedly never accepting having a younger sister; on the other hand, Joan resented the fact that Olivia was apparently her mother’s favorite.
Worsening matters, Joan was often in poor health in childhood and while Olivia was allegedly resentful of the extra time her parents were forced to devote to her sister, Joan begrudged the fact that Olivia was healthy enough to enjoy a normal childhood.
Of the two, Olivia became an actress first, signing a five-year contract with Warner Bros. in 1934. Fontaine had to wait several uneasy years in her sister’s shadow until she finally signed a rival deal with RKO and secured her first lead in 1937’s The Man Who Found Himself. The sisters’ rivalry was now no longer domestic but professional; and all the world was in on it.
In the years that followed, the pair repeatedly competed for the same parts (Joan famously losing the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind to Olivia) and were even romantically attached to several of the same leading men.
But their rivalry truly came to a head in 1942, when both were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress—Olivia for Hold Back the Dawn and Joan for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. Joan won on the night, and although Olivia publicly celebrated by quipping “We’ve won!” Privately she was said to be seething with jealousy.
Olivia went on to win an Oscar herself for To Each His Own in 1947, but derogatory comments Joan had recently made about Olivia’s husband, the writer Marcus Goodrich, soured the occasion.
When Joan tried to congratulate Olivia backstage, she turned her back, and this latest very public slight soured an already bitter relationship. Reportedly, the pair did not speak for the next five years.
With only occasional glimpses of conciliation over the years, the sisters’ rivalry rumbled on for decades; when their mother died in 1975, Joan even accused Olivia of not informing her of the funeral arrangements.
The pair were supposedly still estranged when Joan passed away in 2013, at the age of 96. Olivia died in Paris in 2020, at the age of 104.