Patricia Hitchcock

I have thoughts about the concept of the nepo baby in Hollywood. (“Nepotism” was actually an answer in the LA Times crossword puzzle this morning; you’re welcome, if you haven’t gotten to it yet.) For one thing, some of the great names in the industry technically count. Anjelica Huston, for example. Angelina Jolie. Alexander Skarsgård. And that’s just in the letter A. It can go all the way through to three actresses all with names that are variants of “Zoe,” though I’m not familiar with all of them and won’t claim they’ve moved out of the category by dint of ability. Still. The idea is old enough so that apparently Oscar Wilde spent the first few years of his career being referred to by some people as his mother’s son.

And then there is Patricia Alma Hitchcock. She was the kind of person who was best known for appearing in a handful of the famous parent’s productions—her first appearance on Alfred Hitchcock Presents ends with the host complimenting her performance. Which, to be fair, is pretty good. It’s the episode “Into Thin Air,” when she’s away getting medicine for her mother and returns to find her mother missing. She’s not bad in it. It’s better than any number of others that I’ve seen on that show, though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen most of it.

That said, while it’s not true that every appearance Hitchcock made was directly related to her father, many of them are. Ten episodes of the TV show and three of his movies, specifically. She’s also an extra in Stage Fright, where she doubles for Jane Wyman in addition to having her own role. She’d already been an extra in Sabotage.Her father arranged for her to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She said he didn’t believe in nepotism, which she blamed for not having a larger career, but she was also involved as the family representative for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Was she cast in, say, Playhouse 90 because of her father? Not necessarily directly. If nothing else, that era of TV went through a lot of actors, given every play needed a full cast and there were multiple filmed plays appearing on TV every week. It seems considerably more unlikely that she appeared on TV shows called Suspense and Suspicion independent of who her parents were—let us not make the mistake of underestimating her mother, Alma. I’m sure she was fine playing Totally Not Ethel LeNeve on a show featuring a very young Doris Roberts (who herself started on TV two years earlier), but we all know the name was a draw.

To her credit, most of what she did in the later years of her life was protect her parents’ legacy. She worked on a biography of her mother as a consultant. She appeared on a lot of making-of featurettes on discs of her father’s movies. Delightfully, she had in school once been assigned a paper speculating on what Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite of his own movies had been. Her teacher did not consider her to have presented her evidence clearly enough, but her evidence had been “I asked my father, and this is what he said.” It was a weird assignment anyway.