LOS ANGELES: Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine, who rose to fame during Hollywood’s golden age as the star of several Alfred Hitchcock classics, died on Sunday aged 96.

The Hollywood Reporter cited Fontaine’s assistant Susan Pfeiffer as saying the actress died from natural causes at her home in Carmel, northern California.

Born in Japan to British parents, Fontaine moved in 1919 to California, where she and her elder sister — screen idol Olivia de Havilland -- were to forge successful movie careers. Fontaine and de Havilland remain the only siblings to have won lead actress honours at the Academy Awards.

Yet the two sisters also had an uneasy relationship, with Fontaine chronicling a bitter rivalry in her memoir “No Bed of Roses”. Fontaine began her acting career in her late teens with largely minor roles on the stage and later in mostly B-movies in the 1930s.

It was not before legendary British film director Hitchcock spotted her a decade later that her career took off. Taken aback by her expressive looks, the suspense master cast Fontaine in his first US film, a 1940 adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel “Rebecca”.

She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as a troubled wife.—AFP