A year ago, we ran a Screengrab Top Ten devoted to the greatest Hollywood feuds of all time. Somehow, we neglected to mention the long-running animosity between two real-life sisters--Olivia de Havilland and the younger sibling, Joan Fontaine, both Oscar winning actresses, both big stars in the 1940s, and both reputedly liable to laugh themselves to death if they ever got the chance to see the other step on a roller skate and ride it into an open manhole. Now Rupert Cornwell of the Independent rubs salt in the wound by informing us that both ladies, now 91 and 90 years old respectively, would still like nothing better than to ring each other's doorbell and run. According to Cornwell, the scab got flicked off recently when "the Academy of Motion Pictures which organises the Oscars held a bash honouring the late actress Bette Davis on the 100th anniversary of her birth. Naturally, Joan and Olivia, among the closest surviving contemporaries of Bette Davis were invited. According to insiders, Olivia – who lives in Paris – at first let it be known she could not manage so long a trip. Upon learning her sister would not be coming, Joan agreed to attend. Then Olivia decided after all she would be there in person to commemorate Davis, her friend with whom she had worked in films such as Hush Sweet Charlotte. So Joan in the end took a pass."
There are a couple of schools of thought on the subject of the sibling feud. Some believe that it has been going on for seventy years and has its roots in the women's competition for good roles and awards in an industry that has never made it easy for its actresses. Other believe that it's been going on for, oh, say ninety years, and has its roots in the sisters first getting a look at each other. Certainly whatever fires may have already been burning were fueled when Joan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Rebecca, in a role that her sister had sought for herself. One year later, Joan won the award for another Hitchcock film, Suspicion, and this time, her sister was one of her fellow nominees (for her work in Hold Back the Dawn--Olivia, now the last surviving major cast member of Gone with the Wind, seems to have had a thing for sappy, four-word titles). Remembering the golden moment when she beat her sister like a drum on Oscar night, Fontaine later wrote that "the hair-pulling, the savage wrestling matches, the time Olivia fractured my collar bone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery. My paralysis was total ... I felt age four, being confronted by my older sister. Damn it! I had incurred her wrath again." (Cornwell notes that "In a historical context, it is even more remarkable. If Rebecca was indeed the match that lit the fuse of rivalry, the sisters have been at it since Hitler invaded France. But by Joan's account, the feud extends from the 1920s; in other words they were fighting with each other when Charles Lindbergh first flew the Atlantic.") The psychodrama of the de Havillands would continue to serve as a thread linking Oscar nights yet to come, most notably in 1946, when Joan, pressed into service as an Oscar presenter, wound up handing Olivia the Best Actress award she won that year (for To Each His Own) and looking very much as if she'd like to club her with it. Both ladies have been pretty much retired since some TV work about twenty years ago. But somebody should really move heaven and earth to get them together in a remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? before it's too late.