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Alma Reville

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Alma Reville
Reville in November 1955
Born
Alma Lucy Reville

(1899-08-14)14 August 1899
Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England
Died6 July 1982(1982-07-06) (aged 82)
Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation(s)Screenwriter, film director, film editor
Spouse(s)Alfred Hitchcock
(m.1926–1980; his death)
ChildrenPatricia Hitchcock (born 1928)
Parent(s)Matthew Edward Reville (father)
Lucy Owen (mother)

Alma Lucy Reville, Lady Hitchcock (14 August 1899 – 6 July 1982) was an English film director, screenwriter and editor.[1] She is best known for her work with Alfred Hitchcock, whom she married in 1926.[1]

Early Life

She was born in Nottinghamshire, England, the second daughter of Matthew Edward and Lucy Reville (née Owen).

The family moved to London when Reville was young as her father got a job at Twickenham Film Studios; Reville often visited her father at work and eventually got a job there as a tea girl. At the age of 16 she was promoted to a cutter which involved assisting directors in editing the motion pictures and then continued to work there as a script writer and a directors assistant. These roles enabled her to contribute and become involved with a part of filmmaking that very few women had access to at the time.[2]

The studio closed in 1919 but Alma Reville was given a job by Famous Players-Lasky, an American motion picture company in Islington which was where she met her husband, Alfred Hitchcock. As the same company also gave him a job but as a graphic designer to start with and then started as the role of an art editor. [2]

She is best known as the wife and collaborator of Sir Alfred Hitchcock, whom she met while they were working together at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio in London, during the early 1920s. A talented editor, Alma worked on British films with such directors as Berthold Viertel and Maurice Elvey, though her main focus was her husband’s work. Cinema was the couple's passion. Their first film they worked on together was in 1923 when Hitchcock received the role of assistant director for the film Woman to Woman and Reville had just lost her job from the studios so Hitchcock hired her as an editor.[2]

She converted to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism before their marriage.[3] Alma was just one day younger than her husband.

They married on 2 December 1926 at Brompton Oratory in London. Their daughter Patricia Hitchcock was born on 7 July 1928. Alma became Hitchcock's collaborator and sounding board, with a keen ear for dialogue and an editor's sharp eye for scrutinising a film's final version for continuity flaws so minor they had escaped Hitchcock's own notice and that of his crew. It was Reville who noticed Janet Leigh inadvertently breathing after her character's fatal encounter with Norman Bates' mother in Psycho (1960), necessitating an alteration to the negative.

Career

Throughout the 50 year duration of Alma Reville's marriage to her husband, she worked alongside him by heavily influencing his work with her opinion, yet later in the years she received less credit for the influences she gave upon the films. Peggy Robertson was hired to be Hitchcock's assistant and she noticed how much work Reville was doing for her husband and said that the amount of work that Reville contributed should of amounted to co-authorship. Reville produced many film treatments as well as worked on and re-worked most of Hitchcock’s scripts including; Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Saboteur (1942).[4]

Alma Reville died at the age of 82, two years after Hitchcock's death. She is buried in Los Angeles, California, United States.

She was played by Imelda Staunton in The Girl (2012),[1] and by Helen Mirren in Hitchcock (2012).[1] Staunton was nominated for a BAFTA and a Primetime Emmy for her performance, while Mirren was nominated for a BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award.

Selected filmography

Screenwriter

References

  1. ^ a b c d Anderson, John (16 November 2012). "Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Weapon Becomes a Star". The New York Times.
  2. ^ a b c "Alma Reville Biography". The Biography.com website. A&E Television Networks. Retrieved February 2016. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
  3. ^ Adair, Gene. Alfred Hitchcock: Filming Our Fears. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-511967-3
  4. ^ Leitch, Thomas; Poague, Leland (1 March 2011). A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781444397314.

Further reading

  • Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man by Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell and Laurent Bouzereau (Berkley, 2003)
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