Mrs Thalberg

Seasonal Greetings for the de Havilland Sisters

2009-12-01T19:42:00.006Z

As you know from my previous post, I am in contact with Joan Fontaine and running her official fan page on Facebook.
Miss Fontaine was very happy when I asked her fans to send their birthday wishes for her to me so I could forward them in one collective piece, she gets more fan mail than she can handle. Now, with the holiday season approaching, she asked me to do the same thing again.
Therefore, if you would like to send Miss Fontaine seasonal greetings and make life easier for her this year by having them forwarded by me, please have a look at Joan's Facebook page, and please let everyone know who might be interested.
Miss Fontaine appreciates your cooperation!

Also, I and the fellow admins of Joan's sister, Olivia de Havilland, are doing the same for Miss de Havilland. Thus, please have a look at Olivia's Facebook page for more info, and pass the word along! Thank you!

Joan Fontaine and I

2009-11-14T18:49:00.008Z

My love for Joan Fontaine has lasted a couple of years now, and it all started, as you may have guessed, with my favorite movie, The Women.
Recently, there have been very positive developments in my relationship with Miss Fontaine, and my lovely friend Raquelle from Out of the Past suggested I write it down on my blog and share it with my dear fellow classic movie fans!

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start...oops, I nearly broke into Do-Re-Mi here.
Anyhoo, some time ago, the exact date escapes me, Facebook started to let its users create pages. Being the enthusiastic and generally bored person that I am, I created various pages for my favorite people and movies, such as Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, The Women, Auntie Mame (the list goes on) and - Joan Fontaine. The number of fans grew quickly, and today, more than 800 fans are on Joan's page and are contributing to it by posting pictures and writing about their devotion to Joan and her movies.

As sad as it is, but Joan and her sister are the only two of my favorite actresses who are still alive. As Olivia is not answering fan mail at the moment (I'm hoping it is correct that she will start again once her autobiography is published next year), I wrote to Joan to ask her to sign three pictures for me this summer - it took me a year to actually write to her, as ridiculous as it sounds. Now I know that Joan actually receives too much fan mail for her to handle and read personally, but at that time, thinking about what to write in case Joan does actually read my letter without sounding like the, well, slightly obsessed fan that I am, provided to be quite a challenge.

So, this summer, my mother, upon my request, forced me to sit down and write to Joan. I did, sent the letter with the pictures, and less than two weeks later, I received the pictures back, signed. I was overjoyed and I still am - here is my favorite one!

Joan Fontaine and Norma Shearer in The Women (1939)

As some of you will know, Joan's birthday is on October 22. I had planned to send her a birthday card, but a couple of days before her birthday last month, when I was laying in bed, unable to sleep (the early morning hours are usually my most creative ones), I had a sudden flash of inspiration: why not use my Facebook page to collect birthday wishes for Joan and then send them to her along with my personal wishes? I did, and it proved to be a huge success. Hundreds of wishes were posted on the page and sent to me, and I printed them out and sent them to Joan.

I was not expecting anything to come from it, but I would lie if I said I wasn't secretly hoping for something; I had included my home and e-mail addresses, along with my phone number and the URL of the fan page.

So, last Wednesday, I check my e-mails like every morning, and what do I see? A message from an address unbeknownst to be, with the subject being 'Joan Fontaine'. I immediately knew this couldn't be about anything else but my birthday wishes. I opened it, shaking.
It was an message from Joan's secretary, telling me that Joan has received my package and would like to thank me for it. She also said Joan asked her to have a look at my fan page, as she herself does not have a computer. It found their approval, which makes my page the official Joan Fontaine page on Facebook, and to please remove Joan's P.O. address that I had on it; Joan would like her address removed from the entire internet if she could, she gets too much fan mail for her to handle these days. I was also told that Joan preferred having some of her birthday wishes sent to her in one piece by me, and would like to have this repeated with Christmas wishes; even though she does read some of her fan mail herself, having them collected is easier for her to read through and deal with.

I was on a high for two days after receiving that e-mail, unable to sleep even - I would never have imagined to get this close to Joan. It took me three days to write a reply; again, I was afraid to sound like a lunatic, a complete idiot or utterly boring. I wrote a draft, found the approval of my mother and equally Joan obsessed friends, and I sent it.
Today, I wake up, check my e-mail, and the lovely Ms. Pfeiffer had already sent a reply! Amongst other things she told me, she said, and I quote, she would be more than happy to forward a personal letter from me to Joan! After reading that, I was shaking for more than an hour.

Knowing that Joan Fontaine knows that I exists, that she even knows my name, and will soon read a letter that I wrote to her, is more than I had ever hoped for. I love her secretary for being so kind and getting in touch with me, I doubt she does that with a lot of people, besides, she is very lovely and nice.
The letter I will have her forward will take a couple of days, though, I have so much to tell her and once again, I need to pay attention not to sound too creepy! I've been told I'm a great writer, but I put way too much thought into it which makes it very hard for me to judge whether what I write is good or not.
Anyway, this is my story, and it's far from being over yet!

If you would like to get in touch with Miss Fontaine, please remember that she receives an awful lot of fan mail already, and while she appreciates being thought of by so many people, at this stage of her life, she does not want to sit at her desk and answer everyone. If you would like to send her birthday, Christmas or any other wishes, please have them forwarded by me through the official Joan Fontaine fan page on Facebook. If you have pictures you would like her to sign, please ask me for her address here. Miss Fontaine and I thank you for understanding.

Happy Birthday, Joan Fontaine!

2009-10-21T23:15:00.013+01:00

Today, October 22, is the birthday of one of the very few remaining actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood:

Joan Fontaine!

Even though I expect all classic films fans to know who Joan is, in honor of her birthday I'm posting a few facts about her which I'm considering to be amongst the most interesting.

Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland was born October 22, 1917, in Tokyo, Japan.

Joan was an extremely intelligent child and scored 160 in an IQ test at the age of 3.

Joan is the younger sister of Olivia de Havilland; they have had a complicated relationship since their childhood and stopped speaking completely in 1975.

She was seated next to producer David O. Selznick at a party in 1939, and they began discussing Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca. Selznick asked Joan to audition for the part of the unnamed second Mrs. de Winter, and Joan went through six months of film tests before she finally got the part.

Joan is the only actress to ever win an Academy Award for her performance in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock; she won it for Suspicion in 1941.

Some of her most successful films in the 1940s were The Constant Nymph (1943), Jane Eyre (1944), Ivy (1947) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).

Joan was nominated for the Academy Award three times: For Rebecca, Suspicion and The Constant Nymph.

Joan published her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978.

These days, Joan leads a quite secluded life in Carmel, CA.

These are only a few facts out of the amazing life of the wonderful Joan Fontaine. If you are intrigued by this, I suggest you read her autobiography or watch more of her fantastic films!

If you are on Facebook, please become a fan of Joan on the fan page I'm running with her consent; post your birthday wishes today or send them to me in any way you like and they will be forwarded to Joan! http://www.facebook.com/JoanFontainePage

Anyway, I would like to take this opportunity and say

Happy Birthday, Joan Fontaine!

L'amour, l'amour - My favorite film of all time!

2009-10-18T00:09:00.015+01:00

In my last post, I announced that I would start a list of my favorite movies. However, thinking about how many films there are I that I love passionately, this will be a very long list and possibly the main theme of my blog. Therefore, the movies will not be in order of preference, except for the first film I will post about, the number one on my list, the best film ever made and which I could go on about endlessly because it is just that fabulous.

My number one film, without the shadow of a doubt, cannot be any other than a film that at times I watch at least once every day:

As I wrote in my first post, my mother introduced me to it - or rather, she said 'There's going to be a fantastic film on TV which you have to watch because I'm sure you'll love it' - and with these few words, she not only suggested watching a movie that immediately became my absolute favorite, she also unintentionally introduced my to the woman who I would become completely obsessed with - Norma Shearer.

The Women simply has it all:

Fabulous actresses!

Beautiful dresses!

Norma with a hairstyle that I hate...

Joan Fontaine being so naive and yet so pretty!

Rosalind Russell at her most hilarious!

Norma in general, who I love!

The terrific catfight between Roz and Paulette Goddard...

...and so much more! Witty dialogues, not a single man!, Little Mary's breakdown in the bathroom, 'Jungle Red!', the fashion show - all in color!, 'L'amour, l'amour', plenty of opportunities to complain about how much I loathe Joan Crawford, even more opportunities to proclaim how much I love Norma...

Has there ever been a film more perfect, more fun, more beautiful to look at?
In my opinion, absolutely not! Thus, it's my number one on this list, now and forever, my favorite film of all time!

My Favorite Movies

2009-10-17T20:53:00.003+01:00

Being a lover of many a movie, classic and 'modern' (depending on your definition of the year a film stops being classic and becomes modern), I thought posting my top ten would be a nice thing to do.
However, I realised that I cannot only list ten favorite films, so I decided to keep on writing about films that I like until I can't think of any more, stop wanting to do so or until those who read my blog are utterly bored.
SO! After making all this clear, my next post will be about my favorite film of all time - if you know me, if only a little bit, you will know which one it is.

Welcome, welcome!

2009-10-10T19:17:00.004+01:00

Well hello there! This is my first attempt at trying to produce writings interesting enough to fascinate the lovely blogging community instead of the highly academic essays that I normally write to enthuse my professors. Boy, that was a long sentence.

I suppose introducing myself would be appropriate, so...here we go!
My name is Jenni(fer, actually), I'm 24 years old and I was born about 70 years too late. I am in my final year of American Studies at the University of Hull in lovely Yorkshire, England. What I will do after I graduate next summer, I do not know, but so far the right thing always came along for me.

I love everything from the 1930s and relating to vintage (fashion), and if I could, I would dress like all the incredibly beautiful movie stars from that time every single day of my life.
I never quite fit in anywhere, so I've always kept to myself a lot. However, I love to talk and have conversations about every imaginable topic.

Besides my three cats who I dearly love and who make me happy every day I'm with them (which I'm not when I'm at school, it's a sad sad situation), my family, or, rather, my mother, grandmother and father, who I've learned to appreciate immensely and I'm very blessed with, the most important part in my life, who I devote most of my time to, is the incredibly fabulous, amazingly talented and marvellously beautiful Norma Shearer.

My wonderful mother, Queen of Taste, introduced to me her, or rather, to a film which has since become my all-time-favorite, The Women. I was immediately intrigued and had to watch this masterpiece over and over again. I have to admit that I wasn't infatuated with Norma right away, but after watching The Women for the first fifty of what has become about 1 million times, I did a little research on each of the actresses, because that's what I do, I discovered how fascinating she is and that she converted to Judaism for her first husband, Irving Thalberg, which is something I'm hoping to sometime in the future.
Ever since then, my infatuation has become an obsession which seriously everyone who remotely knows me, knows about. My love for this great woman has reached dimensions which I shall point out at a later stage, but I am sure this very short paragraph already suffices on explaining how much I love Norma Shearer.

I am yet unsure what exactly I want to write about in my blog; I might either devote it solely to classic movies and everything that relates to them, or I will mix it up a little and also write about books, and what is generally going on in my life, or maybe a mixture of everything. Time will tell.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope I was able to intrigue one or two of you, let me say I'm not as boring as I may sound, and I hope you come back to read more of what comes out when creativity strikes me.