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Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine has died, per the AP and multiple news reports. She was 97. Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland to British parents in Japan, Fontaine began her film career under contract with Rko in films like The Man Who Found Himself (1937), her official onscreen “introduction,” A Damsel in Distress (1937) opposite Fred Astaire, and George Cukor’s The Women (1939). A year after leaving Rko, Fontaine starred in the gothic thriller Rebecca as a woman haunted by her new husband’s (Laurence Olivier) dead wife. The film, Alfred Hitchcock‘s American debut, was nominated for 11 Oscars and won two including Best Picture. Fontaine earned her first Best Actress nod and reteamed with Hitch the following year for another domestic thriller, Suspicion, which won her the Academy Award over sister Olivia de Havilland, who was herself nominated for Hold Back The Dawn. Fontaine’s third Best Actress nomination was awarded for 1943′s The Constant Nymph.

Legendary actress Joan Fontaine has died. She was 96. No details are immediately available.

Born in Japan to British parents in 1917, she and her sister Olivia de Havilland moved to California as toddlers and began working for Rko Pictures by 1935. Early roles include the likes of "Quality Street" and "The Women," "Gunga Din," "The Man Who Found Himself," and "Damsel in Distress".

Fontaine achieved stardom in the early 1940s when she scored an Oscar nomination for Alfred Hitchcock's Best Picture winner "Rebecca" (underrated and one of my personal favorite Hitchcocks).

The following year she went on to win the Oscar for "Suspicion," her second team-up with Hitchcock and the only actress to ever win for a Hitchcock film. Fontaine beat her sister that year at the Oscars, and a rejected attempt to congratulate her added to an already frictional relationship - the pair having not spoken since the 1970s. De Havilland currently lives in Paris.