Alma Reville
| Alma Reville | |
|---|---|
Reville in November 1955
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| Born |
Alma Lucy Reville 14 August 1899 Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England, UK |
| Died | 6 July 1982 (aged 82) Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Screenwriter, film director, film editor |
| Spouse(s) |
Alfred Hitchcock (m. 1926–1980; his death) |
| Children | Patricia 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-American screenwriter and editor, best known for her work with Alfred Hitchcock, whom she married in December 1926.
She was born in Nottinghamshire, the second daughter of Matthew Edward and Lucy (née Owen) Reville. 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 16, she was promoted to the position of cutter, which involved assisting directors in editing the motion pictures. Reville continued to work there as a script writer and a director's 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.
The studio closed in 1919, but Alma Reville was given a job at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky, an American motion picture company in Islington, where she met her husband, Alfred Hitchcock. The same company gave him a job as a graphic designer before he became an art editor.
Alma worked on British films with such directors as Berthold Viertel and Maurice Elvey, though her main focus was her husband's work. The first film Reville worked on with Hitchcock was in 1923 when Hitchcock received the role of assistant director for the film Woman to Woman. Reville had just lost her job from the studios, so Hitchcock hired her as an editor.
She converted to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism before their marriage. 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. She 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 and his crew's notice. It was Reville who noticed Janet Leigh inadvertently breathing after her character's fatal encounter with Norman Bates's mother in Psycho (1960), necessitating an alteration to the negative.
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