Patricia Hitchcock

Patricia Alma Hitchcock was the only child of Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville. Her upbringing was 'English' and strict. Two years of boarding school from the age of eight was followed by relocation to the U.S. a year later when Hitch was contracted by David O. Selznick to direct Rebecca (1940). Keen to join the acting fraternity, Pat appeared on stage by the early 40s. In 1944, she played the titular role in the short-lived Broadway play Violet at the Belasco Theater. Though she would have liked to go on to a college education, her father instead packed her off to London when she was 18 to study at RADA (among her classmates were Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin). She made several appearances on the London stage, followed by an inauspicious screen debut in 1949. In 1950, she had a small role in her father's thriller Stage Fright (1950) (as 'Chubby Bannister') which set the tone for her future roles, usually as the dowdy friend or sister of the heroine (Strangers on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960)). She was also featured in ten episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955), whenever (in her own words) "they needed a maid with an English accent". In a 1984 Washington Post interview she bemoaned the fact that her father had not believed in nepotism, so that more work would have come her way. In 1951, Pat got married and -- barely a decade later -- decided to forsake show business to raise a family. Her father did not object. In 2003, Pat published a book of reminiscences and anecdotes (co-authored by film writer Laurent Bouzereau), entitled Alma Hitchcock: the Woman Behind the Man, asserting that "My mother had much more to do with the films than she has ever been given credit for - he depended on her for everything, absolutely everything".