Pat Hitchcock

Patricia Alma Hitchcock O'Connell was born on 7 July 1928 in London, England, the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1939. Hitchcock died on 9 August 2021 in Thousand Oaks, California, at the age of 93.

From childhood, Hitchcock pursued acting, making her first screen appearance as an uncredited extra alongside her mother in her father's film Sabotage (1936), in which the two appear among a crowd watching the Lord Mayor's Show parade. In the early 1940s she began working in stage productions and summer stock. Her Broadway career spanned from 1942 to 1951 and included three productions: the play Adam Solitaire, in which her father helped her secure a role in 1942; the comedy Violet (1944), in which she played the title role; and the play The High Ground. After graduating from Marymount High School in Los Angeles in 1947, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and also performed on the London stage.

Hitchcock appeared in supporting roles in three of her father's films. In Stage Fright (1950) she played Chubby Bannister, a fellow acting student of the character portrayed by Jane Wyman, and additionally doubled for Wyman in scenes requiring danger driving after her father noted their physical resemblance. In Strangers on a Train (1951) she portrayed Barbara Morton, sister of Anne Morton, played by Ruth Roman. Her third role in a Hitchcock film came in Psycho (1960), in which she played Caroline, a character who offers tranquilizers to Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh. Beyond her father's productions, Hitchcock appeared in Jean Negulesco's The Mudlark (1950), starring Irene Dunne and Alec Guinness, playing a palace maid, and took a bit part in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). She appeared in ten episodes of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and also worked on Playhouse 90, directed by John Frankenheimer, and the 1953 television series Life with Father.

Hitchcock also contributed to her father's legacy in capacities beyond acting. She edited Alfred Hitchcock Presents: My Favorites in Suspense, published by Random House in 1959, and served for several years as the family representative on the staff of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. She supplied family photographs and wrote the foreword for Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco (2002) by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal. In 2003 she co-wrote, with Laurent Bouzereau, a biography of her mother titled Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. She also served as executive producer of the documentary The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2000), about production designer Robert F. Boyle.

On 17 January 1952, Hitchcock married Joseph E. O'Connell, Jr., son of Boston businessman Joseph E. O'Connell, at Our Lady Chapel in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. The couple had three daughters: Mary Alma Stone, Teresa Carrubba, and Kathleen Fiala. Joseph O'Connell died in 1994.