Was the second Mrs. De Winter English or American?

I don't have the definitive answer, but the dialogue below (during the scene when she sketched Maxim) seems to imply her home is England:

We're lucky not to be home during the bad weather, aren't we? I can't ever remember enjoying swimming in England until June, can you?


Mag, Darling, you're being a bore.

I think she is supposed to be English. (Or, at the very least, she and her late father were "Anglicized ex-pats" and had lived in England for quite a while.)

When Maxim asks her if she has ever been to Cornwall, she says that she and her father once went there on holiday and saw a picture of Manderley in a gift shop there.

Not 100% proof, of course, but it doesn't seem likely that a struggling painter and his daughter would travel all the way from the U.S. to Cornwall in England for a vacation.

Note, too, that she uses the typically English term, "on holiday" rather than the more American term, "vacation".

So I suspect that she is English, and when Mrs. Van Hopper came over to tour, she hired her there to be a companion.

It is somewhat more complicated in fact than to say Joan Fontaine was an American. She was literally born in Japan, but to English parents. She lived there for a few years until her mother, having separated from and then divorcing her father, moved to California for Joan's health. I think this was when she was about 8 (born in 1917, moved I think in 1925). Joan returned to Tokyo to live with her father for about a year, in 1932, before moving back to California. But she not only was raised by her English mother, she also was solely a British citizen until 1943, when she also became an American citizen, and thereafter I think had dual citizenship.

From this kind of background it is likely that Ms. Fontaine grew up with parents who had an English accent, but probably became more Americanized in her speech as she spent more time in California. But... she no doubt could revert to her English accent, and most of her roles soon after Rebecca were in explicitly English characters, from Suspicion, to This Above All (an explicitly WWII patriotic film where she played a Londoner), to Jane Eyre. Later there was Ivy.

In other roles playing an American, such as Born to be Bad, she used more of an upper middle to upper class American accent that to be honest is not the stretch for one having an English accent than, say, a south Texas accent might prove.

As for her character in Rebecca, I am virtually certain she was at least originally English. SHe may have journeyed to America, implicitly possible after her father died, where she might have met up with Mrs. van Hopper. But the film does not go into that. More to the point I don't see anything in her character as the second Mrs. de Winter that would suggest she is or considers herself to be an American. (Certainly I would like to think if she was a New Yorker she would not have taken so much crap from Mrs. Danvers. Heh.)

In the novel, the second Mrs. De Winter was English.