| Biography | Alma Lucy Reville, Lady Hitchcock, was an English-American screenwriter and editor, writer of many of Alfred Hitchcock's scripts, including Shadow of a Doubt, Suspicion and The Lady Vanishes, as well as script for other directors, including Henrik Galeen, Maurice Elvey and Berthold Viertel. Reville's filmography is extensive with writing credits on many films that were among the biggest of their time.
Her 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 16, she was promoted to the position of cutter, which involved assisting directors in editing the motion pictures. Of editing, she wrote 'the art of cutting is Art indeed, with a capital A, and is of far greater importance than is generally acknowledged'. She continued to work there as a script writer and director's assistant. These roles enabled her to become involved with a part of film-making that very few women had access to at the time.
Reville met Alfred Hitchcock while both worked at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky, an American motion picture company in Islington. Reville was just one day younger than Hitchcock. The pair were married on 2 December 1926 at Brompton Oratory in London after Reville converted to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism, apparently at the behest of Hitchcock's mother. Reville was baptized on 31 May 1927 and confirmed at Westminster Cathedral by Cardinal Francis Bourne on 5 June. In 1928, when they learned that she was pregnant, the Hitchcocks purchased "Winter's Grace", a Tudor farmhouse set in 11 acres on Stroud Lane, Shamley Green, Surrey, for £2,500. Their daughter and only child, Patricia Alma Hitchcock, was born on 7 July that year. |