Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell (born
July 7, 1928, London, UK) is a
British-born American actress and
producer.
She is the only child of the film director
Alfred Hitchcock and film editor
Alma Reville. The family moved to
Los Angeles, California, in March
1939.
As a child, Hitchcock knew she wanted to be an actress. In the early
1940s, she began acting on the
stage and doing
summer stock. She performed in
Broadway productions of
Solitaire (
1942) and
Violet (
1944).
After graduating from Marymount High School in Los Angeles in
1947, she attended the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and also appeared on the London stage. In early
1949, her parents arrived to make Hitchcock's first feature
motion picture in England since going to
Hollywood. Pat did not know she would have a walk-on in the movie until her parents arrived. Because she bore a resemblance to the star,
Jane Wyman, her father asked if she would mind also doubling for Wyman in the scenes that required "danger driving."
She had small roles in three of her father's movies:
Stage Fright (
1950) in which she played a jolly acting student named Chubby Bannister, one of Wyman's school chums;
Strangers on a Train (
1951), playing Barbara Morton, future sister-in-law of Guy Haines (
Farley Granger), and
Psycho (
1960), playing
Janet Leigh's plain-Jane office-mate, Caroline, who generously offers to share tranquilizers that her mother gave her for her wedding night.
Pat Hitchcock also worked for
Jean Negulesco on
The Mudlark (
1950), which starred
Irene Dunne and
Alec Guinness, playing a palace maid, and she had a bit-part in
DeMille's The Ten Commandments.
She married Joseph E. O'Connell, Jr.,
January 17, 1952, at Our Lady Chapel in
St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. They decided to have their wedding there because Pat had many friends on the
East Coast and Joe had relatives in
Boston.
She and Joe O'Connell have three daughters, Mary Alma Stone (born
April 17, 1953), Teresa "Tere" Carrubba (born
July 2, 1954), and Kathleen "Katie" Fiala (born
February 27, 1959).
As well as appearing in ten episodes of her father's half-hour
television program, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock worked on a few others, including
Playhouse 90, which was live, directed by
John Frankenheimer. Acting for her father, however, remained the high point of her acting
career, which she interrupted to raise her children. (Hitchcock has a small joke with one of her appearances on his show- after saying good night and exiting the screen, he sticks his head back into the picture and remarks: "I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn't you?")
She also served as executive
producer of the
documentary The Man on Lincoln's Nose (
2000), which is about Robert F. Boyle and his contribution to motion pictures.
She supplied family photos and wrote the foreword of the book
Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal, which was published in
2002. In
2003, she published
Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man, co-written with Laurent Bouzereau.
Patricia and Joseph O'Connell currently live in
Solvang, California. 
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