Alma Reville

Alma Lucy Reville, Lady Hitchcock (14 August 1899 – 6 July 1982) was an English film director, screenwriter, and editor. She is best known for her work with Alfred Hitchcock, whom she married in 1926.

She was born in Nottinghamshire, England, the second daughter of Matthew Edward and Lucy Reville (née Owen).

She is best known as the wife and collaborator of Sir Alfred Hitchcock, whom she met while they were working together at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio in London, during the early 1920s. A talented editor, Alma worked on British films with such directors as Berthold Viertel and Maurice Elvey, though her main focus was her husband’s work. Cinema was the couple’s passion. She converted to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism before their marriage. Alma was 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. Alma 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 escaped Hitchcock's own notice and that of his crew. It was Reville who noticed Janet Leigh inadvertently breathing after her character's fatal encounter with Norman Bates' mother in Psycho (1960), necessitating an alteration to the negative.

Alma Reville died of natural causes at the age of 82, two years after Hitchcock's death. She had suffered from breast cancer some years before her death, but made a full recovery from the illness. She is buried in Los Angeles, California.

She was played by Imelda Staunton in The Girl (2012), the BBC, HBO film about the relationship between Sir Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) and by Helen Mirren in Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock (2012), about the production of Psycho.

Selected filmography

Screenwriter

• The Ring (1927)
• The Constant Nymph (1928)
• The First Born (1928)
• A South Sea Bubble (1928)
• A Romance of Seville (1929)
• After the Verdict (1929)
• Juno and the Paycock (1929)
• Murder! (1930)
• The Skin Game (1931)
• Mary (1931)
• The Outsider (1931)
• Sally in Our Alley (1931)
• Rich and Strange (1931)
• Nine Till Six (1931)
• The Water Gipsies (1932)
• Number Seventeen (1932)
• Waltzes from Vienna (1934)
• Forbidden Territory (1934)
• The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935)
• Secret Agent (1936)
• Sabotage (1936)
• Young and Innocent (1937)
• Jamaica Inn (1939)
• Suspicion (1941)
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
• The Paradine Case (1947)
• Stage Fright (1950)