Patricia Hitchcock died at the age of 93 on the night of Sunday to Monday, in her sleep, at her home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Announced one of her three daughters, Tere Carrubba, on Wednesday (August 11th). “She always knew how to protect the heritage of my grandparents, she made sure that it was not forgotten” she confided. “It’s like the end of an era now that they’re all gone. “
Patricia Hitchcock, often referred to as “Pat”, was born in London in 1928. Daughter of Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville-Hitchcock, she has spent much of her life managing family affairs. While still a child, Afred Hitchcock directed several films today considered classics, such as The 39 Steps, A woman disappears or The shadow of a doubt. Alma, a former director, was his advisor with whom he developed his ideas for history. “My mother contributed a lot more to my father’s films than you might think. He depended on her on absolutely everything ” , thus explained Patricia Hitchcock in 1999 in an interview with Guardian.
Roles in “L’Inconnu du Nord-Express” and “Psychose”
Patricia Hitchcock spent a lot of time with her father on the set of his films, before entering acting school. Admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London in 1947, she was on the verge of graduation when her father offered her to star in his new film, The Unknown of the Nord-Express, adapted from the short story by Patricia Highsmith.
Besides his roles in sitcoms My Little Margie, The Life of Riley and several other roles in the series Alfred Hitchcock presents, she also starred in The Great Alibi, made by his father, as well as in the masterpiece Psychosis. Pat Hitchock plays an office colleague of Janet Leigh, now known for the famous scene where she is stabbed to death in the shower of a hotel.
More recently she worked on theAlfred Hitchcock magazine, a magazine of police news broadcast in several festivals and documentaries. She also contributed to the writing of the book Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco, by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Levental, sharing photos of his father and writing the preface. Pat Hitchcock was, moreover, the co-author of the work on his mother died in 1982, Alma Hitchcock: the woman behind the man, two years after the disappearance of Alfred Hitchcock.
“I would have hoped he would act nepotism”
Married for over forty years to Joseph O’Connell, who died in 1994, with whom she had three children, she described her childhood as happy and called her parents “Normal”. She still felt a certain distance from her father. As a little girl, she often ate alone and was sent to boarding school several times. Pat Hitchcock had to give up her college career when her father decided she had to return to England. She regretted, moreover, that he had not asked her more to act in his films. “I would have hoped he would act nepotism”, she said.
At home, the director was sometimes cruelly teasing towards him. During the filming of The Unknown of the Nord-Express for example, knowing his daughter’s vertigo, he bet $ 100 with her that she would not ride a Ferris wheel. The young actress was then found stuck and terrorized for an hour, she confided in the biography written in 1983 by Donald Spoto, The dark side of genius. “They turned off the lights and pretended to go away”, she said in 1993 to Chicago Tribune, conclusive: “The most sadistic thing about it is that I never got the $ 100. “