**Joan Fontaine (1917-2013)** was a British-American actress, an icon of classic cinema. She became famous for her intense performances in melodramas and psychological thrillers.

Her career took off thanks to her collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock: for *Rebecca* (1940), she received her first Academy Award nomination. The following year, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Hitchcock's *Suspicion* (1941), where she embodied the role of the paranoid wife.

Fontaine was known for her ability to portray fragile, timid, vulnerable female characters, often endowed with surprising inner strength, frequently grappling with situations of danger or uncertainty. Among her other significant roles were Jane Eyre in the eponymous film (1943) and Lisa Berndle in *Letter from an Unknown Woman* (1948), works that cemented her image as an actress of great emotional sensitivity.