Joan Fontaine's Oscar Dress

One of Hollywood's 'greatest' sibling rivalries was blown wide open at the 1941 Academy Awards, so let's take a look at the dress worn by Joan Fontaine when she beat her older sister, Olivia de Havilland, and won for Suspicion. 

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In the book Made For Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards by Bronwyn Cosgrave, a version of the story of how Joan prepped for the Oscars that year is shared. According to Cosgrave, Joan had left shopping for an Oscar dress to the last minute and due to wartime restrictions, couldn't find anything appropriate from the Warner Bros costume department. 

According to Cosgrave, Olivia de Havilland and the salon director of I Magnin, Stella Hanania, showed up to her dressing room with options. The department store was reportedly stripped of anything appropriate in Joan’s size—size six—and taken over to the lot in the back of a limousine ordered by Olivia. 

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Out of these choices, Joan settled on a silk onyx skirt and a midnight lace mantilla. She was still in hair and makeup for The Constant Nymph, so the team also set about gussying her up, and then Olivia reportedly wished her luck, left to dress herself, and that was it. 

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In Joan's 1978 autobiography, No Bed of Roses, she recalls Oscar night thusly: "...Olivia arrived with our usual saleslady from I. Magnin. They deposited in my dressing room tan-and-white-striped boxes containing all the size sixes the store possessed. Between takes, I tried on all the dresses, finally selecting a ballet-length black number with a lace skirt and mantilla, which was hastily basted to fit me."

Joan also writes that she didn't even want to attend the Oscars due to the filming schedule of The Constant Nymph, because she knew she'd have to stay out late and party, and didn't want to be tired the next day. But Joan did attend the Oscars, reportedly because Olivia coerced her into attending, since the publicity surrounding the first pair of sisters ever nominated for Oscars together was so great. 

Joan ended up winning that evening, the first and only Oscar ever given to an actor for their performance in an Alfred Hitchcock film. The above newsreel only shows Joan after winning, not the moment her name was announced, but according to No Bed of Roses, she didn't react right away after hearing her name, causing Olivia to mutter in her ear, "Get up there, get up there!" which only stressed her out and took the joy out of the moment. 

Olivia would win two Oscars later in the decade, for To Each His Own in 1946 and The Heiress in 1949. On the night she won her first Oscar, Joan was backstage waiting to congratulate her. The moment was captured and has been shared widely in the years since: Olivia walking past her younger sister without so much as a smile or acknowledgement. 

The feud, real or imagined, took wings that night.