Lethbridge Herald (16/Mar/1971) - Hitchcock lives quiet life

Details

• article: Hitchcock lives quiet life
• newspaper: Lethbridge Herald (16/Mar/1971)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, Frenzy (1972), Grace Kelly, The Paradine Case (1947)

Article

Hitchcock lives quiet life

LONDON (AP) — His movies to the contrary, life with Alfred Hitchcock is quiet and peaceful.

That's the word from his wife Alma.

"We go to bed at 10 o'clock most nights," she says. "That's why we are still fit and healthy."

Looking two decades younger than her 71 years, Mrs. Hitchcock is accompanying her husband, also 71, as he scouts out locations for Frenzy, the next film he will direct. It concerns a multiple murder based on a suave sadist who mutilated and murdered two women in Britain during the late 1940s.

In a film studio Hitchcock is a master of spine-tingling suspense and horror liberally laced with impish humor, but "there is nothing macabre about him at home," Mrs. Hitchcock says.

"He is very quiet and neat and tidy" she reports. "He spends much of his time reading."

The quiet of their life back home in Bel Air, Calif., is broken only by dinner parties.

"We have a very modest home," said Mrs. Hitchcock. "When we have guests who are our special friends, like Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, we always eat in the kitchen. The stuffy ones we entertain in the dining room, which is not so nice."

The Hitchcocks married in 1926. As Alma Reville she worked as a film editor and assistant director. She helped Alfred in all his films up to The Paradine Case.

Hitchcock still has a tremendous sense of humor, she said, but he no longer goes in for elaborate practical jokes as he did in younger days.

"I remember one we did in London many years ago," she said. "We invited all our friends lo a blue dinner. Everything had been dyed blue — the bread rolls, the meat, the vegetables, the soup and the drinks."