One person I've always regretted not being able to meet during my adventures in Hollywood is one Lilian Ruse Fontaine, the mother of our Star of the Month Joan Fontaine and her older sister (by 15 months) Olivia de Havilland (TCM's Star of the Month in May 2003). Lilian died in 1975, and what an extraordinary woman she must have been - raising two such high-achieving daughters, both of them talented, beautiful, strong-willed, popular and Academy Awarded, winning their Best Actress prizes (Joan's in 1941, Olivia's in 1946 and 1949) in an era when competition was more numbingly tough than it is today.

During our salute to Joan this month we'll be showing the film that brought her the prized Oscar®, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, as well as that other Hitchcock film which one year earlier made her a bona fide star of the first rank, Rebecca (both on Nov. 21). Unlike sister Olivia who became a film star virtually overnight with her first outing, the 1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Joan had a slower path to stardom, and we'll be covering that as well - movies like her very first one, No More Ladies starring Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery, also made in 1935, in which the real-life Joan de Havilland had a brief supporting role, billed 10th under the name Joan Burfield. (She first became known as Joan Fontaine, borrowing her stepfather's name, for her second film, the 1937 Quality Street with Katharine Hepburn, which we'll also be showing, on Nov 7.)

We'll also be giving you an ample sampling of several early Fontaine starring roles in films you've probably never seen, or even knew existed (You Can't Beat Love, The Man Who Found Himself, Maid's Night Out), which are B-budget programmers in which she gained the invaluable experience that put her in good stead when she began working with such A-league directors as Hitchcock, George Cukor, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray.

Our 19 Fontaine films also include Gunga Din, The Women, the Technicolored Ivanhoe as well as a few genuine curiosities. One is 1937's A Damsel in Distress in which she was put in the unenviable position of being Fred Astaire's partner in his first Gingerless musical in years, a nightmarish assignment for Fontaine since, by her own admission, her dancing experience had been limited to nightclubs on Saturday nights. We're also showing Orson Welles' 1952 Othello in which Fontaine and Joseph Cotten do unbilled bits, as a gag, as a boy page and a senator, respectively; there's also a CinemaScopic tale (1961's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) in which the elegant J.F. is unceremoniously eaten by a shark.

We will, indeed, be bringing you a wide range of looks at this charismatic actress who inspired one critic to suggest, "With her fragile beauty and cultured, melodic voice, she may be the most ideal movie heroine of our time." The public's adoration of her began when she spoke the famous first nine words in the classic Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...") and, lucky us, we can spend quality time with her every Monday night this month on TCM.

by Robert Osborne