“Great deal of gratitude”: When Joan Fontaine demanded Alfred Hitchcock slap her on set
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t usually need any encouragement when it came to abusing actors. He didn’t reach John Ford’s level of manipulation and vitriol, but he didn’t have the greatest respect for the stars who brought his movies to life either. He famously believed that “all actors should be treated like cattle” and described them as “stupid children”.
More troublingly, he was also more than a little inappropriate with several of his female stars. As his “cattle” comment suggested, he tended to view his actors as property, especially when they were under contract with him. Tippi Hedren found this out the hard way. When the director took it upon himself to turn her into a star, she quickly learned that the opportunity came with a catch.
Hedren would later come forward to accuse him of sexual assault and stalking, claiming that he had tried to force her to touch him and had attempted to forcibly kiss her. When Hedren tried to extricate herself from the long-term contract she had signed with the director, he allegedly said that he would ruin her career.
If you were a female actor whom Alfred Hitchcock had cast in a film, you would probably want to go out of your way to avoid his abusive tendencies, but Joan Fontaine went the opposite direction. She had the distinction of starring in the director’s first Hollywood feature, Rebecca. Based on the classic Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name, the film centres on a young woman who marries a mysterious, wealthy older man. When she moves into his manor house to begin married life, she becomes obsessed with his late wife, whose spirit seems to inhabit every inch of the property.
In a 1969 interview, Fontaine recalled that the shoot was extremely challenging. Laurence Olivier played her husband in the film, and Hitchcock liked to keep them at odds. “He had a habit, whether it was conscious or not, I don’t know, but of rather keeping all his actors at loggerheads,” she explained, adding, “It was good for me because it made me suffer quite a lot and feel quite miserable all the time, and it probably came out that way on screen.”
During one scene, however, she just couldn’t find enough misery to give the performance the director wanted. “I had to cry one day quite a lot,” she recalled, “And I said, ‘Hitch, I just can’t cry anymore.'” He asked her what she was going to do about it, and she asked him to slap her across the face. He was more than happy to.
Not surprisingly, the tears erupted from her eyes, and she managed to carry the scene off to his satisfaction. The volume of tears was “partly pain,” she acknowledged, but also “a great deal of gratitude for his understanding.”
Fontaine went on to earn an Oscar nomination for her performance in the film, and the painful experience she had working with Hitchcock clearly didn’t harm their relationship too severely. A year later, she starred in his thriller Suspicion, playing the wife of a manipulative gambler who might be a murderer (played to pitch-perfect creepiness by Cary Grant). Fontaine’s performance is more nuanced in Suspicion than in Rebecca. She had to play a woman who was being slowly gaslighted by the person she loves, requiring a slow progression of a performance that deservedly won her the Academy Award, no slapping necessary.
