At the end of Patricia Hitchcock’s first of ten appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, her father’s half-hour television program in 1955, the master of suspense stuck his head back on to the screen to address the viewers: “I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn’t you?”
So good, in fact, that she had already enjoyed speaking roles in two of his films and would do so again in a third. The first was in Stage Fright (1950) with Sybil Thorndike, Joyce Grenfell and Marlene Dietrich in which she played Chubby Bannister, a friend of Jane Wyman’s drama student who sets out to clear her former boyfriend of murder. She recalled her father asking her to double for Wyman in the “danger driving” scenes, adding: “I drove right into that camera and had to stop at a plate-glass window.”
