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Joan Fontaine today: One of the best actresses of the studio era has her ‘Summer Under the Stars’ day Joan Fontaine, one of the few surviving stars of the 1930s, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" star today, Tuesday, August 6, 2013. I’m posting this a little late in the game: TCM has already shown six Joan Fontaine movies, including the first-rate medieval adventure Ivanhoe and the curious marital drama The Bigamist, directed by and co-starring Ida Lupino, and written by Collier Young — husband of both Fontaine and Lupino (at different times). Anyhow, TCM has quite a few more Joan Fontaine movies in store. (Photo: Joan Fontaine publicity shot ca. 1950.) (TCM schedule: Joan Fontaine movies.) As far as I’m concerned, Joan Fontaine was one of the best actresses of the studio era. She didn’t star in nearly as many movies as sister Olivia de Havilland, perhaps because...

Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, made into a 1940 Academy Award-winning movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is getting the movie-remake treatment: see my previous post, Alfred Hitchcock/Rebecca Remake Announced. Many will surely be accusing Hollywood of having no imagination whatsoever, ignoring the fact that movie remakes have been around for as long as movies have been around. [Photo: Daphne Du Maurier.] Now, even less well-known in most circles is that Du Maurier's Rebecca bears an uncanny resemblance to another novel. No, not Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (made into a 1944 movie directed by Mary Poppins' Robert Stevenson, and starring Rebecca's Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles), or even, more distantly, to Rachel Field's All This, and Heaven Too, itself based on actual events and made into a 1940 Academy Award-nominated movie by Anatole Litvak, starring Bette Davis and Charles Boyer (in addition to the Oscar-nominated Barbara O'Neil as Boyer's insane wife). The Rebecca...