Truffaut once asked him how many times he had read The Birds Hitch said he read it only once, and very fast. In spite of their friendship, Hitchcock never met Sir Gerald’s literary daughter. Sir Gerald was an actor who had appeared in Hitch’s movie Waltzes from Vienna (1933) he even told French director François Truffaut that he considered Sir Gerald “the best actor anywhere.” The two men both loved playing practical jokes, and Hitchcock once invited Sir Gerald to a black tie and tails party, but he told him it was a fancy dress party instead, so Sir Gerald showed up in costume. Hitchcock was a friend of du Maurier’s father. Even though it was cold and rat-infested, she once said she loved it “more than people.”Īlfred Hitchcock adapted three of du Maurier’s works to the screen: Jamaica Inn (1939) wasn’t a big hit, but Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963) became movie classics. She took a lease on the house in 1943, and lived there for 26 years. The house was called Menabilly, and she was fascinated by it. She modeled the novel’s gloomy mansion, Manderley, after an abandoned house in Cornwall that she and her sister had discovered back in 1926.
When she sent it off to her editor, she warned that it was “a bit on the gloomy side,” and she had serious doubts about whether people would read it. She became consumed with jealousy of this dead woman, and that jealousy inspired her novel Rebecca (1938). But du Maurier found some letters written to her husband by his former fiancée, who had committed suicide. He sailed to Cornwall to see it for himself, and met the author, and three months later they were married. She published her first novel when she was 24, and her descriptions of Cornwall captivated an army major named Frederick Browning.
She and her sister loved to explore the coast, and she wrote about it in many of her books and stories. Her parents bought a summer home in Cornwall when du Maurier was a teenager, and she felt a strong affinity for the place. “All I can remember … is someone who looked at me with a sort of disapproving irritation, a queer unexplained hostility.” “I can’t remember once being held by her, feeling her arms round me, sitting on her lap,” she told a friend. Her mother, as du Maurier remembered her, was a cold woman. Her father was a successful actor-manager, and he was frequently unfaithful. Her parents were wealthy, but bohemian, theater people. It’s the birthday of English novelist Daphne du Maurier, born in London (1907).
“Bad News Good News” by Marjorie Saiser from I Have Nothing to Say About Fire.
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