Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell, the only child of Alfred Hitchcock and an actor herself who made a memorable appearance in her father’s Strangers On A Train and championed his work in the decades following his death, has died at age 93.
Hitchcock died on Monday in her sleep at home in Thousand Oaks, California, her daughter Tere Carrubba said on Wednesday. She died of natural causes, said Ms Carrubba.
“She was always really good at protecting the legacy of my grandparents and making sure they were always remembered,” said Ms Carrubba, one of Patricia Hitchcock’s three daughters.
“It’s sort of an end of an era now that they’re all gone.”
Known to many as Pat Hitchcock, she was born in London to Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville Hitchcock in 1928 and spent much of her life in and around the family business.
During her childhood, Alfred Hitchcock directed such classics as The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes and Shadow Of A Doubt, moved to California after signing a multipicture deal with producer David O Selznick and rose to global fame as the “Master of Suspense”.
Alma was his indispensable adviser, a former film editor through whom he vetted story ideas and screenplay treatments.
“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,” Pat Hitchcock told The Guardian in 1999.
Pat would visit her father’s movie sets and by her teens was acting in school plays and appearing on stage, including the Broadway productions Solitaire and Violet.
She was admitted to London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1947 and was about to graduate when her father contacted her and said he had a role for her in his new film, Strangers On A Train, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel.
Hitchcock was a lively, witty actor and her other acting credits included the TV sitcoms My Little Margie and The Life Of Riley and several roles in the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
She also had parts in her father’s Stage Fright and in his horror masterpiece Psycho, in which she plays an office colleague of Janet Leigh, who later in the film is famously stabbed to death in a motel shower.
More recently, she worked for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, appeared at numerous film festivals and in numerous Hitchcock documentaries and contributed photographs and a foreword to Footsteps In The Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco, by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal.
She also co-authored a book on her mother, who died in 1982, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind The Man. (Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980).
Pat Hitchcock was married for more than 40 years to Joseph O’Connell, who died in 1994. They had three children.
