Rex
09-13-2010, 05:08 PM
Old Hollywood still has the best DIRT, I swear.... (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1311426/Olivia-Havilland-Joan-Fontaine-Their-decade-feud.html#ixzz0zOeYdO6o)
Last Thursday, amid the formal splendour of the Élysée Palace in Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy conferred France’s most prestigious accolade, the Légion d’honneur, on a little, silver-haired lady, aged 94, with sparkling brown eyes and an impishly familiar smile.
That bewitching smile and those amazing eyes once made Olivia de Havilland the queen of Hollywood and the winner of two Oscars.
But one member of her immediate family — and the one who has known her longer and better than anyone in this world — her only sibling, Joan Fontaine, 92, herself an Oscar-winner of equally illustrious status as a legend of stage and screen, was conspicuous by her absence from the ceremony.
When the President placed the blood-red ribbon and star of the Légion d’honneur around Olivia’s neck, Joan was 6,000 miles away at her home in Carmel, California, studiously ignoring the occasion — just as she has ignored every aspect of her sister’s existence for decades.
These two formidable grandes dames of the screen have been at loggerheads for most of their lives. Both frankly confess that, even as children, they detested one another.
As someone with a close-in-age older sibling, I can feel Joan's pain more....
She recalled how, in July 1933, when she was 15, ‘Olivia threw me down on the poolside flagstone border, jumped on top of me, and fractured my collarbone’.
There are two sides to every story, but our sweet Melanie was a bully to her older sister!
But it was in their professional lives that their mistrust reached a crescendo. Joan, keen to win the role of Melanie in Gone With The Wind, was considered ‘too chic! Melanie must be a plain southern girl’.
‘What about my sister?’ said Joan, a query that directly led to Olivia gaining the role, an indebtedness to Joan she would come to resent. Olivia, for her part, had been angling for the role of the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, but the director Alfred Hitchcock chose Joan instead. Both sisters were Oscar-nominated, Olivia for Gone With The Wind, Joan for Rebecca.
Team Joan :shuffle: Olivia would have been awful as the second Mrs. De Winter, but I think Joan would have done all right as Melanie. But it's all so much water under the bridge, innit?
But the final break between the sisters came in February 1975, when their mother died from cancer.
‘I was not invited to her memorial service,’ alleged Joan. ‘Only after burning the telephone wires from coast to coast’ — and threatening to ‘call the Press and give them the whole story’ — was the service postponed and Joan and her daughter Debbie permitted to attend.
At the service, the sisters didn’t speak to each other. Olivia ‘scattered a handful of ashes, then silently passed the container to me.
'Thus I said goodbye to my mother. As for Olivia, I had no words at all.’
Olivia’s daughter, Gisele, and her son, Benjamin, were remembered ‘generously’ in Lilian’s will. But ‘not even a trinket’ was left to Joan’s daughter, Deborah.
Three years later, the publication of Joan’s autobiography, No Bed Of Roses — mischievously re-titled by the second of her four husbands, film producer William Dozier, as No Word Of Truth — hardened the estrangement beyond recovery.
It presented a venal portrait of Olivia, who was said to regard the book as ‘poisonous’. At the 50th anniversary of the Oscars in 1979, Olivia and Joan had to be seated at
opposite ends of the stage. Outside, in the corridor, the sisters passed each other without a glance. BITTAHNESS 4EVAH.....:fragile:
Oh well, not all sibs get along. Discuss.:cool:
Last Thursday, amid the formal splendour of the Élysée Palace in Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy conferred France’s most prestigious accolade, the Légion d’honneur, on a little, silver-haired lady, aged 94, with sparkling brown eyes and an impishly familiar smile.
That bewitching smile and those amazing eyes once made Olivia de Havilland the queen of Hollywood and the winner of two Oscars.
But one member of her immediate family — and the one who has known her longer and better than anyone in this world — her only sibling, Joan Fontaine, 92, herself an Oscar-winner of equally illustrious status as a legend of stage and screen, was conspicuous by her absence from the ceremony.
When the President placed the blood-red ribbon and star of the Légion d’honneur around Olivia’s neck, Joan was 6,000 miles away at her home in Carmel, California, studiously ignoring the occasion — just as she has ignored every aspect of her sister’s existence for decades.
These two formidable grandes dames of the screen have been at loggerheads for most of their lives. Both frankly confess that, even as children, they detested one another.
As someone with a close-in-age older sibling, I can feel Joan's pain more....
She recalled how, in July 1933, when she was 15, ‘Olivia threw me down on the poolside flagstone border, jumped on top of me, and fractured my collarbone’.
There are two sides to every story, but our sweet Melanie was a bully to her older sister!
But it was in their professional lives that their mistrust reached a crescendo. Joan, keen to win the role of Melanie in Gone With The Wind, was considered ‘too chic! Melanie must be a plain southern girl’.
‘What about my sister?’ said Joan, a query that directly led to Olivia gaining the role, an indebtedness to Joan she would come to resent. Olivia, for her part, had been angling for the role of the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, but the director Alfred Hitchcock chose Joan instead. Both sisters were Oscar-nominated, Olivia for Gone With The Wind, Joan for Rebecca.
Team Joan :shuffle: Olivia would have been awful as the second Mrs. De Winter, but I think Joan would have done all right as Melanie. But it's all so much water under the bridge, innit?
But the final break between the sisters came in February 1975, when their mother died from cancer.
‘I was not invited to her memorial service,’ alleged Joan. ‘Only after burning the telephone wires from coast to coast’ — and threatening to ‘call the Press and give them the whole story’ — was the service postponed and Joan and her daughter Debbie permitted to attend.
At the service, the sisters didn’t speak to each other. Olivia ‘scattered a handful of ashes, then silently passed the container to me.
'Thus I said goodbye to my mother. As for Olivia, I had no words at all.’
Olivia’s daughter, Gisele, and her son, Benjamin, were remembered ‘generously’ in Lilian’s will. But ‘not even a trinket’ was left to Joan’s daughter, Deborah.
Three years later, the publication of Joan’s autobiography, No Bed Of Roses — mischievously re-titled by the second of her four husbands, film producer William Dozier, as No Word Of Truth — hardened the estrangement beyond recovery.
It presented a venal portrait of Olivia, who was said to regard the book as ‘poisonous’. At the 50th anniversary of the Oscars in 1979, Olivia and Joan had to be seated at
opposite ends of the stage. Outside, in the corridor, the sisters passed each other without a glance. BITTAHNESS 4EVAH.....:fragile:
Oh well, not all sibs get along. Discuss.:cool: