By Khalida Sarwari
There is a De Havilland Drive in Saratoga that’s named after Oscar-winning actress and one-time Saratoga resident Olivia de Havilland and a Fontaine Drive that was named after her mother, Lilian Fontaine. No streets bearing the name of her equally famous sister, Joan Fontaine, exist, but perhaps that will change with Fontaine’s recent passing.
Fontaine died of natural causes on Dec. 15 at her home in Carmel. She was 96.
The actress was born in Tokyo to British parents Walter and Lilian on Oct. 22, 1917. Due to her and her older sister’s recurring ailments, the family moved to California in 1922 with the hope of improving their health. Lilian de Havilland and the two girls settled in Saratoga while Walter returned to his practice in Japan. They would remain in Saratoga until 1933.
In a 2010 phone interview with local author Audry Lynch for the Saratoga Historical Foundation, Fontaine recalled memories she had made in Saratoga, of maypole dances and living among prune and apricot orchards. During her youth, she worked at the old Saratoga Library, which now houses the Book-Go-Round.
“Saratoga was the most wonderful little hamlet in the world,” she told Lynch.
The sisters attended Oak Street school, although repeated bouts of rheumatic fever and pneumonia kept Fontaine out of school many days. When the school closed down during the construction of a new campus, she recalled a prank her sister played.
“Olivia figured out how to get into the old school bathrooms and led a group of us into it,” she remembered. “Guilt-ridden but giggling, we stuffed newspaper into all the johns, flooding the lower floor.”
In the interview she also recalled the time she spent at Montalvo, the site of many theatrical experiences for the family and later where Fontaine’s mother’s ashes were scattered. She described Hakone Gardens as “a child’s paradise,” a place where she and her sister were exposed to musicians and opera stars.
“I especially loved Tojo, the gardener, who gave me my first ‘just for me’ present: a Japanese white ceramic cat,” Fontaine recalled.
Lynch, who maintained regular phone and mail correspondence with Fontaine in recent years, described her as “very amicable and very pleasant.”
“Over the last year or two, we talked a lot on the phone,” Lynch said. “I sent her articles from the Saratoga News related to her family. She was very, very, very sweet.”
Of her reported feud with her sister, Lynch said Fontaine never expressed any bitterness toward de Havilland in their conversations. When she did talk about her, it was usually a recollection of their childhood in Saratoga, Lynch said.
She recalled Fontaine telling her that she loved her five dogs more than anything. She had described them as “my family” and said, “I’m a very affectionate person, and no man was ever able to satisfy that need for affection as well as my dogs do.”
Said Lynch, “I thought despite all her fame, she was a little bit of a sad lady.”
Fontaine’s career spans more than 60 years on Broadway and in film and television. She won an Oscar for her role in the 1941 Alfred Hitchcock film Suspicion, in which she played Cary Grant’s wife. Other notable films include Rebecca, The Constant Nymph, Jane Eyre, Letter from an Unknown Woman and Island in the Sun, in which her character has a groundbreaking interracial romance with a black politician played by Harry Belafonte.
In her later years, Fontaine worked in shows and movies on TV, and earned a nomination in 1980 for a daytime Emmy award for her role on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope.
Off screen, Fontaine spent most of her time traveling around the world and was a licensed pilot. She excelled in golf and was an avid reader, balloonist, prize-winning tuna fisherman, student at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in New York and a licensed interior decorator.
Fontaine was married to and divorced from Brian Aherne, William Dozier, Collier Young and Alfred Wright Jr. She is survived by daughters Deborah Leslie, whose father is Dozier, and Martita, the daughter of a caretaker she met while visiting Peru for a film festival in 1951 and took to live with her, although she never officially adopted the girl. She also leaves behind sister Olivia, from whom she had long been estranged.
The day after Fontaine’s death, the 97-year-old de Havilland, who resides in Paris, issued a statement saying she was “shocked and saddened” by her sister’s death and that she was grateful for the “expressions of sympathy.”
