“I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood,” movie star Joan Fontaine once said of her equally famous older sister, Olivia de Havilland.

De Havilland begged to differ. “I loved her so much as a child,” she told Vanity Fair in 2016. Throughout their long lives, they seemed to disagree with each other about almost everything, making theirs one of the few Hollywood feuds which truly lived up to the hype—so much so that it was a subplot in the first season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud. (One that de Havilland did not care for.)

Each woman’s resume was impressive. Fontaine was the Oscar-winning star of films including Rebecca, Suspicion and The Women. De Havilland won two Oscars to her sister’s one, gracing the screen in movies as varied as Gone with the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Snake Pit and The Heiress. Their love lives were impressive as well, with Fontaine boasting romances with Conrad Nagel, Brian Aherne, John Houseman, Adlai Stevenson, the Aga Khan and cartoonist Charles Addams. For De Havilland there were affairs with Howard Hughes, Jimmy Stewart and John Huston.

As Charles Higham’s catty, gossipy, seemingly pro-Joan 1984 biography, Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine paints them, both were steely, brave, and talented know-it-alls, determined to have the last word. In Fontaine’s delightfully bitchy, self-serving 1978 autobiography, No Bed of Roses, she claims victimhood in almost every situation—particularly regarding her sister—leading de Havilland (and Fontaine’s ex-husband William Dozier) to refer to the book acidly as No Shred of Truth.

de Havilland’s own literary output, the charming and slight 1962 expatriate memoir Every Frenchman Has One, scarcely mentions her younger sister. But after Fontaine’s death in 2013, the claws came out. “Dragon lady,” as she referred to Fontaine, “was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.”

Indeed, Fontaine even made a competition out of their impending mortality, spilling their sibling rivalry into the afterlife. “I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did,” Fontaine said in 1978. “And if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it!”

Made in Japan

Oliva de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan. Joan followed quickly, on October 22, 1917. “From birth,” Fontaine writes in No Bed of Roses, “we were not encouraged by our parents or nurses to be anything but rivals.”

Their parents were an odd pair. Father Walter De Havilland was a British expatriate who had studied at Harrow and Cambridge and was descended from a prolific Channel Island family that had a streak of insanity. An eccentric, haughty, deeply strange man, he married the much younger Lillian, a thwarted English actress who in Fontaine’s view was a “snob” with exquisite taste, “a rigid code of behavior… and not one mediocre thought in her head.”

Both girls, particularly Fontaine, were sickly, and the marriage was a disaster. In 1919, Lillian escaped, taking the girls to San Francisco to start a new life. While the nervous, flighty Fontaine suffered from health problems and was often in bed, De Havilland was a popular, hardworking go-getter, whom Fontaine claims would torture her by reading aloud from the Bible.

“Listening to her read aloud the crucifixion from the Bible in mounting gusto, I not only experienced man’s inhumanity to man, but that of sister to sister,” Fontaine writes. “When she read of the crown of thorns…my screams were heard down the entire row of cottages.”

In 1925, Lillian married George Fontaine, whom both girls agreed was strict, abusive and rigid. De Havilland nicknamed him “the iron duke.” The new family settled in the genteel California hamlet of Saratoga, which De Havilland referred to amusingly as “the most aristocratic village in the prune belt.”

The sisters were trained to be artistic, cultured, sober young ladies. “Around the dining room table sat the seven- and eight-year-old sisters, reading aloud from Shakespeare,” Fontaine writes, “After a slurred or mispronounced word, a ruler was smartly applied to taut knuckles by mother of the golden voice.”

Within this stressful, competitive hot house, Fontaine claims that the perfectionist De Havilland—her mother’s clear favorite—bullied her timid sister. At nine, for a school assignment, Olivia was reportedly assigned a pretend last will. “I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister, Joan,” she allegedly wrote. “Since she has none.”

The Belles of the Prune Belt

The dramatic one-upmanship continued into their adolescence. In Every Frenchman Has One, de Havilland recalls how Fontaine was sent to a new convent school before her, where she immediately endeared herself to the Catholic nuns. “With the really beastly shrewdness that younger sisters are wont to have, she had a vision,” de Havilland writes. “Right there, during mass, she had seen the Virgin Mary, and had immediately fainted…now you try following to a convent a younger sister who has had a vision. Just try it.” De Havilland prayed to have a vision as well, but to no avail.

In Fontaine’s version, the sisters’ rivalry only intensified when an IQ test proved she was smarter than de Havilland, and her older sister became downright abusive. While swimming one day as a teenager, she claims Olivia attacked her—“threw me down on the poolside, flagstone border, jumped on top of me and fractured my collar bone.” De Havilland admitted she did tussle with her sister, but only because Fontaine grabbed her ankle. She also claimed that the event happened when they were much younger.

But Fontaine writes that there were darker forces at work, which the reader can only imagine had an enormous impact on the sisters’ tortured relationship. In No Bed of Roses, she accused their stepfather, George, of molesting them, leading the sisters to “agree something was odd.” The strict, sinister household grew so intolerable that Fontaine went to live with her father and his new wife in Japan, only to claim he propositioned her for sex.

Despite the horror, according to both Fontaine and Higham, the awkward girl blossomed in Japan, and became a sophisticated rebel, out of the shadow of her older sister. When she returned to America, she saw de Havilland’s success in theater, and decided that acting was her destiny as well. Her sister’s mantra, de Havilland told a reporter, was “I want to do what you are doing,”

The Mice That Roared

The three de Havilland women moved to Hollywood, where Olivia made a splash in the filmed version of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Fontaine paints herself as a pathetic Cinderella whose evil older sister forced her to change her stage name to “Fontaine,” so her own rising star would not be tarnished. “Olivia now ruled with total autonomy. Joan made a passable cook, housekeeper, chauffeur for the rented Ford…after all Olivia was paying the rent,” she writes in third person. “She was the star, and I was the servitor on probation.”

But little sister was clearly not as pathetic as she makes herself out to be. With a bit of help from her Quality Street co-star Katharine Hepburn, she was soon a popular ingenue, competing with her sister for roles and men. In No Bed of Roses, she boasts that de Havilland’s paramour Howard Hughes asked for her hand while he was dating her sister. (Some, including Higham, dispute this account.) Fontaine claims that when she told de Havilland of the proposal, her sister flew into a rage. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” she writes, “especially in favor of a sister.”

Fontaine even takes credit for handing her sister her most iconic role. She claims that in 1938, she was asked to audition for the role of Melanie in Gone with the Wind, only for director George Cukor to say she was “too chic” for the role. It was then that she made a “grave error.” Fontaine writes:

George threw his hands in the air. “Melanie must be a plain simple southern girl.”

“What about my sister?” I parried.

Bu after Fontaine’s death, de Havilland got back at her, taking credit for clearing the way for Fontaine’s own most famous role. According to de Havilland, David O. Selznick wanted Olivia for the lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. But Warner Brothers boss Jack Warner would not loan her out, so Selznick asked whether she would mind if he used Fontaine instead. She acquiesced, although 70 years later she was still vaguely catty about the outcome. “She was really better for it than I was,” de Havilland noted to Vanity Fair in 2016. “She was blonde; Larry”—Olivier, who played the film’s male lead—“was brunette.”

Sisters in Scandal

Hollywood’s snarkiest siblings came by their acid tongues honestly. According to Higham, at the afterparty for the premier of Rebecca, their mother, Lillian, was interviewed on the radio by Louella Parsons. “Joan has always seemed rather phony to me in real life,” she told the shocked gossip columnist, “but she’s quite believable on the screen.”

As the sisters’ status increased, the bad blood between them was the talk of Hollywood. Things came to a head when both were nominated for the best actress Oscar in 1942. Placed at the same table, all eyes were on the sisters as a visibly nervous Ginger Rogers announced the winner: Joan Fontaine, for her role as Cary Grant’s fearful wife in Suspicion.

“I froze,” Fontaine writes. “I stared across the table, where Olivia was sitting opposite me. ‘Get up there,’ she whispered commandingly. Now what had I done! All the animus we felt toward each other, the hair-pullings, the savage wrestling matches…all came back to me in kaleidoscopic imagery. My paralysis was total. I felt Olivia would spring across the table and grab me by the hair ... Damn it, I incurred her wrath again!”

But again, Fontaine’s protestations of helplessness fall on deaf ears. When de Havilland married author Marcus Goodrich in 1946, Fontaine claims she meant no harm when she told a reporter: “All I know about him is that he’s had four wives and written one book. Too bad it’s not the other way around.”

This remark seems to have spearheaded an estrangement which would last years. When de Havilland won her first Oscar for To Each His Own in 1946 (her second would be for The Heiress in 1950), Fontaine went over to congratulate her. “She took one look at me, ignored my outstretched hand, clutched her Oscar to her bosom, and wheeled away,” Fontaine writes. Photographer Hymie Fink snapped the snub, and a Hollywood legend was born.

Queens of their Own Fiefdoms

By the 1950s, the sisters had forged very separate lives. Fontaine, whom Higham describes as flippant and cool, was locked in a bitter custody battle with her second husband, the producer William Dozier, over their daughter, Deborah. She eventually moved to New York City, living the high life with a coterie of society friends.

Meanwhile, de Havilland—serious, intense and impassioned, in Higham’s view—moved to Paris with her son, Benjamin, to marry Pierre Galante, editor of Paris Match. In Every Frenchman Has One, she recounts her determined adventures attempting to fit into her tony adopted home. For such a grand lady, she reveals a ribald, coquettish sense of humor, unafraid to discuss the bathroom habits of the French, their obsession with suppositories, and their hatred of a large bosom.

The sophisticated sisters’ paths would occasionally cross, with varying results. According to Fontaine, when de Havilland came to see her perform in Tea and Sympathy in London in 1954, her only words of congratulations were “isn’t it something.” Likewise, she claims that she planned a party for her sister in New York, only for de Havilland to send her regrets with a large bouquet of Japanese quince. “Taking my friends directly to the mammoth floral display, I introduced them to my ‘guest of honor,’” Fontaine writes. “They all agreed Olivia had never looked lovelier.”

But deep down, there was love. According to Joan, she loaned her sister money in 1969 when she visited a distressed de Havilland, who was leaving Galante, in Paris. And in 1974, in perhaps the tenderest scene in the arch No Bed of Roses, she recalls how de Havilland nursed her after a bad breakup with her longtime boyfriend. “Oliva dressed me, put me to bed, held me in her arms as she sang a Japanese lullaby from our childhood,” she writes. “Still the tears would not stop.”

Two Sides of the Same Coin

“A feud implies continuing hostile conduct between two parties,” de Havilland once told a reporter regarding her relationship with Fontaine. “I cannot think of a single instance where I initiated hostile behavior. But I can think of many occasions where my reaction to deliberately inconsiderate behavior was defensive.”

Fontaine could think of many. In No Bed of Roses, she claims that she was spurred to write her autobiography after de Havilland hijacked their mother’s 1975 funeral. According to Fontaine, de Havilland attempted to block her from attending, only changing the date after Fontaine threatened to go to the press. At the service, the two sisters did not speak. “She scattered a handful of ashes, then silently passed the container to me,” she writes. “Thus, I said goodbye forever to my mother. As for Olivia, I had no words at all.”

They would allegedly never speak again. But it was de Havilland who had the last word. After Fontaine’s death, she finally became liberated to tell her side of the story, saying of their relationship: “On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in later years, severed.” When asked if she would have talked if her sister was still alive, she was defiant. “If Dragon Lady were alive today, out of self-protection I would maintain my silence!”

In the end the reader does not feel sadness about these two strong women’s estrangement. Instead, it seems that sometimes, even family is happier apart. As Higham notes, De Havilland, who died in 2020 at the age of 104, became a “queen mother” with the “unqualified devotion” of her children… and her sister’s children (Fontaine’s relationship with her daughters was notoriously strained.) Fontaine lived a “totally free,” artistic, self-determined life, later secluding herself in her beautiful Carmel home.

They had accomplished their goals. “I felt ‘different’ from my very first conscious moments. I think Olivia did too,” Fontaine writes. “We didn’t want to be like everyone else. We strove to be individuals, to make our personal mark on whatever we were doing…to this day we have maintained our own individuality.”