Born: 14 August 1899, United Kingdom
Died: 6 July 1982
Country most active: United States, United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Alma Reville was a skilled film writer, director, and editor in her own right, but many of her contributions to her husband, Alfred Hitchcock’s, films went unacknowledged. For example, she worked extensively on preparing and adapting scripts for films such as Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Saboteur (1942). Of those, she was only credited for Suspicion, meaning she was not included when Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent were each nominated for Best Original Screenplay Oscars. The British Film Institute notes, “Of the films on which she has a writing credit, it’s striking how many contain strong, well-drawn female roles …Stage Fright is the last film Alma was credited on; apparently the failure of Under Capricorn (1949), a property she had recommended to Hitchcock, led her to lose confidence in her judgement. Her absence shows; while Hitchcock’s later films are among his best regarded, the female roles tend to be less deeply examined, the action usually driven by the male protagonists.” Hitchcock himself alluded, perhaps unintentionally, to this when he said, “I never understood what women wanted. I only knew it wasn’t me.”
The lack of credit went well beyond writing, as the British Film Institute writes that “From finding properties for him to produce, to casting, scouting locations, plotting camera angles and checking rushes, there were few areas that Alma didn’t contribute to. Once in Hollywood, she was less frequently seen on the set of his films, but was a key collaborator behind the scenes on every project.”
Film critic Charles Champlin wrote in 1982, “The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma’s.” While accepting his AFI lifetime achievement award in 1979, Hitchcock himself said that were it not for Alma, he may have been at the event not onstage but as “one of the slower waiters.”
Read more (Wikipedia)
Read more (Women Film Pioneers Project)