Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Joan Fontaine

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“There’s a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away with it. I’d hate to see them on stage with a dog act.” —Joan Blondell

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“How many women do we know who were continually kissed by Clark Gable, William Powell, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and Fredric March? Only one: Myrna Loy… And to meet whom did Franklin D. Roosevelt find himself tempted to call off the Yalta Conference? Myrna Loy. And to see what lady in what picture did John Dillinger risk coming out of hiding to meet his bullet-ridden death in an alley in Chicago? Myrna Loy, in Manhattan Melodrama.”
—Lauren Bacall on the greatness of Myrna Loy

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“The main problem in marriage is that for a man sex is a hunger like eating. If the man is hungry and can’t get to a fancy French restaurant, he goes to a hot dog stand. For a woman, what is important is love and romance.”
—Joan Fontaine

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Marilyn was a very calculating girl. She was never late on our set, I’ll tell you that. She was trying to get me to go to bed with her while she was trying to get Howard [Hawks, the director] to do the same thing! We both knew it and—I can speak only for myself—it turned me off. Completely.”
—Cary Grant via An Affair to Remember by Maureen Donaldson and William Royce
Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant in a scene from Monkey Business, 1952.
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Hidden Hollywood: Joan Fontaine’s Honeymoon from Hell

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Joan Fontaine, Rebecca 1940
Joan Fontaine, Rebecca, 1940

In 1939, Joan Fontaine, twenty-one years old, was slowly making her way up the Hollywood ladder. MGM signed Fontaine to play a small part in the high profile production The Women, directed by George Cukor, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard. For the young actress, it was a plum assignment.

At the same time, Fontaine was subject to numerous screen tests for the role of the second Mrs. De Winter for David O. Selznick’s highly anticipated Rebecca, first under the direction of John Cromwell and then Alfred Hitchcock. The screen tests were grueling, and the emotional toll devastating. Fontaine’s nerves were seriously frayed.

Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland were living in the same house in North Hollywood with their overbearing mother Lilian, a failed actress. As always, Joan and Olivia were engaged in a low-intensity conflict. Like so many Hollywood actresses, Fontaine’s father was long gone.

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