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Joan Fontaine was an actress from the 1930s to the 1990s. One would have thought that Joan Fontaine, being the talented and beautiful sister of established star Olivia De Havilland, would have quickly achieved fame herself. However, she came to Hollywood in 1934, and only appeared in one movie in 1935. It was two years later, after she changed her name to Joan Fontaine, that she started appearing in lots of movies, but it was not until 1940's "Rebecca" (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film) and 1941's "Suspicion" (winner of the Best Actress Academy Award for this film) that she became a major star! As noted above, she was the sister of Olivia De Havilland, and they had a decades-long feud (sadly, there is no longer any hope of a reconciliation, because Miss Fontaine passed away in 2013 at the age of 96). AND Patricia Neal was born Patsy Louise Neal in Whitley County, Kentucky in 1926, but her family moved to Tennessee when she was a toddler. There have been many famous Hollywood and Broadway stars who have faced adversities in their life and managed to overcome them, but few have ever faced anywhere near the degree of difficulties Neal had to deal with! She started acting as a teen, and briefly went to college, but soon moved to New York, hoping to become a Broadway actress. Just 20 years old, she got a job on Broadway as an understudy in The Voice of the Turtle, and was told to change her name to Patricia. Later that year, still not yet 21, she starred in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, and that year they awarded the very first Tony Awards, and Neal won as Best Featured Actress in a Play. She was signed to a movie contract by Warner Bros, and she starred opposite Ronald Reagan in John Loves Mary. Writer Ayn Rand was writing the screenplay for the movie version of her novel The Fountainhead, and she saw her and suggested her for the role of Dominique Francon opposite Gary Cooper's Howard Roark. This led to a two year off-screen affair with the much older Cooper (whose personal life in no way mirrored his onscreen persona!), and when Neal told Cooper she was pregnant, he broke off the affair and insisted she get an abortion. Since her movie career to that point had not been particularly notable (in this period she is likely best remembered for her role in The Day the Earth Stood Still), she went back to New York and took a lead role in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, and also married Roald Dahl (then unknown, but later he wrote Charley and the Chocolate Factory). Neal had five children with Dahl, and appeared on stage, TV and in a few movies (most notably A Face in the Crowd and in Hud, where she deservedly won an Oscar). Then she had one of the most depressing series of tragedies imaginable. First, her baby son was hit by a car while in a baby carriage, and he had permanent brain damage. Soon after, her oldest child, who was seven, developed encephalitis and died. Three years later, Neal (pregnant with her fifth child) had three strokes and blood clots in her brain, and she was in a coma for 21 days, but amazingly, her baby was born healthy, although Neal had severe disabilities, losing her speech and most basic skills. With much help from her husband, Neal re-learned to do everything in just ten months, and he urged her to return to acting, which she did, making a memorable return to the screen in The Subject Was Roses. She also was excellent in Earl Hamner's TV movie, The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, where she played an anxious Olivia Walton awaiting her mostly unseen husband, and the success of this movie led to the TV series The Waltons. But more sadness awaited Neal. She made a friend of a young widow, and invited her to stay with her, and that "friend" had an affair with her husband, Dahl, and they divorced. Neal has continued to act sporadically, and she continues to make appearances on the Tony Awards shows (she is the only surviving winner from the very first Awards, and she absolutely is a "survivor", in every sense of the word!). AND Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany. She became a stage actress in her teens, and she appeared in three German movies, but when Hitler came to power Rainer, who was Jewish, wisely recognized his evil early on, and came to the U.S. in 1935, where she was signed by MGM, the number one studio. Studio head Irving Thalberg was so taken with her talent that he cast her in the lead in Escapade, opposite one of MGM's biggest stars, William Powell. Her follow-up movie was The Great Ziegfeld, again with Powell, and she had the basically minor role of Powell's first wife, Anna Held. But she had one key heartbreaking scene where she talks on the phone to Powell, and the camera is on her the entire scene, and her acting is so memorable that everyone was talking about that as they left the movie. The motion picture Academy had just added the "Best Supporting" categories, and Rainer should have, and would have won that Award, but for unknown reasons MGM used their clout to get Rainer nominated for Best Actress instead, and she won. The following year Thalberg put Rainer in the lead of The Good Earth, his dream project, based on Pearl Buck's best seller about poor farmers in China. Of course, the movie should have starred Anna May Wong, but the studio could not have a non-Asian play love scenes with a real-life Asian (!), and since there was no Asian male star to play opposite her, Wong was out, and Rainer got the lead role of O-Lan. For her husband. Wang Lung, Thalberg acquired Paul Muni from Warners, and Muni had won the Best Actor Oscar the year before, thus pairing both winners from the previous year. Both lead actors, but especially Rainer, used almost no "yellow face" make-up, something that had not been done in similar productions to that time. The movie was first-rate, and Rainer won her second consecutive Best Actress Oscar (Muni did not win, and it may well have been partly because he was NOT an MGM contract actor, and they likely used their clout against him, as they had helped Rainer the year before, and instead MGM helped Spencer Tracy, who WAS under contract to them, to win instead). MGM rushed double winner Rainer into FIVE additional movies in 1937 and 1938, and even though she starred opposite the best MGM stars, including Powell and Tracy, none of the movies were very good or very successful. With World War II beginning, Rainer had her family in Europe to worry about, and given the lackluster state of her film career, she did not mind abandoning MGM, and she returned to the stage, making one more movie in 1943 for Paramount. In 1945, when the war ended she married a rich English publisher, and she has lived in retirement ever since, making a very few film and TV appearances, including showing up for two Oscar tributes to past winners, in 1998 and 2003. As of today, she is the oldest living Oscar winner! WAS there an "Oscar jinx" that hurt Rainer's career? I think so, but only in the sense that winning a Best Acting Oscar hurts lots of great actors like F. Murray Abraham or Geoffrey Rush. After that, they can no longer easily take supporting roles, or lead roles in minor movies that might best suit their talents, and instead often get pushed into big budget movies in starring roles that DON'T suit them. More important, right after her second Oscar, Rainer had the terrible double whammy of losing her mentor Irving Thalberg, who died during the filming of The Good Earth, and she also married tortured soul Clifford Odets, and I would bet those two events harmed her career far more than any "jinx"! Incidentally, Odets also had an affair with Frances Farmer while married to Rainer which greatly added to HER rapid decline, so Odets may have the unusual distinction of helping end the careers of two of the finest actresses ever, and at the same time!

Important Added Info: Note that this REPRODUCTION still has been personally autographed (signed) by Joan Fontaine, Patricia Neal, AND Luise Rainer!

Note that our consignor was the owner of a video store for over 20 years, and he attended many trade shows and obtained autographs in person. He also was a memorabilia dealer/collector for many years who purchased collections and estates, and he would buy autographed items in those ways. He feels certain that this item has authentic signatures, but he does not have a certificate of authenticity.

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