Patricia Alma O’Connell Hitchcock once said that she wished her father had had a more nepotistic sense – then she would have made it further as an actress. Alfred Hitchcock’s only daughter was born in London in 1928, they spent the week in town and drove to the country house in Surrey at the weekend, until Hollywood called Hollywood in the late 1930s and the family moved to Los Angeles. What Patricia reported about it sounds wonderfully unglamorous and not at all like a wild Hollywood childhood. The Hitchcocks lived in Bel Air, went to church on Sundays, and Pat’s mother, Alma Reville, who Alfred had met while filming and who was his collaborator from scripts to editing, cooked Alfred’s favorite dishes in the evenings. Except when he was grilling.
Hitchcock’s only child soon had their new home under control, Patricia wanted to become an actress, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, made her debut on Broadway in 1942. Her father has cast her in small roles a few times, for example in “The Stranger on the Train” (1951) she plays Barbara: When the murderer Bruno demonstrates at a party how to strangle someone, he almost goes through with him – and he stares at Barbara as if she were his real target. Patricia Hitchcock has forbidden any interpretations of this scene. She then worked for the radio, and once she landed a big TV series role it didn’t work out because by then she had married businessman Joseph O’Connell and was already pregnant.
The mother’s contribution to the father’s films was undervalued, the daughter found
Pat Hitchcock said she inherited determination from both parents alike. She considered her mother Alma’s contribution to Hitchcock’s films to be undervalued, as Pat Hitchcock said in a long interview with the American Television Academy when the book was published in 2003 Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man that she had written with Laurent Bouzereau. Alma Reville was named as a screenwriter in Hitchcock’s films up to “Die Rote Lola” (1950), but, as the daughter and Hitchcock himself said, he always needed her for everything.
But Pat often applied for roles in her parents’ films, not directly, but from the staff – most of the time her efforts were in vain, and the father then decided that she was simply not the right person for the role, she said. As the CBS series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” was filmed between 1955 and 1962, but she appeared ten times in it, always in small roles – she was cast, she told the Washington Post 1984, “whenever you needed a housemaid with a British accent”.
So nothing came of the really big film career. So she became famous mainly as a daughter. Because of her, five of Hitchcock’s most successful films, including “Das Fenster zum Hof” and “Vertigo”, were banned from showing for a long time before his death in 1980 – Hitchcock owned the rights and added value to Patricia’s legacy by making them rarer. Pat Hitchcock died last Monday in California at the age of 93.