Artist Rebecca

The only Hitchcock film to collect a Best Picture Oscar, Rebecca benefits from the luxuriant standards of Gone With The Wind producer David O. Selznick, but the film’s deep malevolence is unmistakably Hitchcock’s. Though the title character is never actually seen—she died in a boating accident—her presence still haunts ex-husband Laurence Olivier, who remarries the shy Joan Fontaine and takes her back to his country estate in Cornwall. Soon after Fontaine arrives, she begins to feel unwelcome, a suspicion confirmed by Judith Anderson as Rebecca’s eerily devoted housekeeper. The basic premise of two similar women (one alive, one “dead”) occupying one man’s mind would later resurface in Vertigo.

Updated 02/04/2010