Directed by Valerie Clarke
May 9, 10 & 11, 2002

Programme Notes        [ Photographs ]

In many ways the life of Daphne du Maurier resembles that of a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, the daughter of a famous actor-manager, she was freed from financial and parental restraint. Indulged as a child, she grew up in a lively London household where friends like J.M. Barrie and Edgar Wallace visited frequently. She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the continent with friends, and writing stories.

Her uncle, a magazine editor, published one of her stories when she was a teenager and got her a literary agent. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties; its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married. Her subsequent novels became best sellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. While Alfred Hitchcock's film based upon her novel proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca (1938).

Rebecca's opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," is among the most memorable in twentieth-century literature. The story centres on a young and timid heroine. Her life is made miserable by her strangely behaving husband, Maxim de Winter, whom she has just married. Maxim is a wealthy widower - his wife, Rebecca, having died in mysterious circumstances. His house is ruled by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who has made Rebecca's room a shrine. Du Maurier focuses on the fears and fantasies of the new wife, who eventually learns, that her husband did not love his former wife, a cruel, egotistical woman. Due to the familiar plot, suits of plagiarism were brought against du Maurier, but they were dropped when the widespread use of the theme, beginning from Charlotte Brontë's works, was established. Du Maurier's book, on the other hand, inspired Maureen Freely's novel The Other Rebecca (1996), in which the enigmatic Maxim de Winter appears as Max Midwinter.

Before Alfred Hitchcock's film project (1940), Orson Welles made a radio dramatisation of Rebecca. It was performed in December 1938 by The Campbell Playhouse and sponsored by Campbell Soup. The adaptation starts with Bernard Herrmann's waltz-laden score but is then interrupted by an "important message from a man who keeps one eye on the dining table and another on the pantry..." Welles played Maxim de Winter and Margaret Sullavan the second Mrs de Winter.

The producer David O. Selznick sent a transcript of the broadcast to Hitchcock. "If we do in motion pictures as faithful a job as Welles did on the radio," Selznick wrote, "we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had."

Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris. In her childhood she was a voracious reader, she was fascinated by imaginary worlds and developed a male alter ego for herself. Du Maurier also had a male narrator in several novels. Her first book, The Loving Spirit, appeared in 1931. It was followed by Jamaica Inn (1936), a historical tale of smugglers, which was bought for the movies, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock - later Hitchcock also used her short story 'The Birds', a tense tale of nature turning on humanity. Frenchman's Creek, a pirate romance, was filmed in 1944. My Cousin Rachel (1951) was made into film in 1952. The story examined how a woman, who perhaps has murdered her husband, may manipulate a man. Ambrose Ashley meets the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and dies six months later. He has sent letters to his nephew Philip, the narrator, who first hates Rachel, and then is bewitched by her.

Du Maurier leaves open the question, is Rachel a poisoner, or an innocent victim of Ambrose's and then Philip's paranoid fantasies? The author herself was as puzzled as her readers, did Rachel kill Ambrose? "Sometimes I think she did, sometimes I didn't - in the end I just couldn't make up my mind," du Maurier said. Rachel dies, taking the secret with her, but Philip's role in her death is clear, and perhaps he is the real murderer of the story.

In 1932 du Maurier married Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Arthur Montague Browning II, who was knighted for his distinguished service during World War II. They were happily married for thirty-three years and had three children.

With her son, Christian, she published Vanishing Cornwall in 1967. Like Rebecca, many of her novels and short stories were set in Cornwall - the wild, stormy weather and wild past inspiring her imagination. "Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known," she wrote in Vanishing Cornwall. "Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone." Du Maurier's home was at a seventeenth-century mansion, Menabilly, overlooking the sea, for a quarter of a century. The house became the scene of her historical novel The King's General (1946).

In the late 1950s, du Maurier began to take interest in the supernatural. During this period she wrote several stories, which explored fears and paranoid fantasies, among them The Pool, in which a young girl glimpses a magical world in the woods, but is later barred from it. The Blue Lenses, the story of a woman sees everyone around her having the head of an animal.

In 1970 appeared her second collection of short stories, Not After Midnight, which included Don't Look Now, a tale set in Venice, involving a psychic old lady, a man with the sixth sense, and a murderous dwarf. A film version of the story, directed by Nicholas Roeg, was made in 1973.

Besides popular novels Du Maurier published short stories, plays and biographies, including that of Branwell Brontë, the brother of sisters Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. Her biography of Francis Bacon, an English statesman in the 1500s, appeared in 1976.

Du Maurier's autobiography, Growing Pains, was published when she was 70. Du Maurier was made dame in 1969 for her literary distinction.

She died on April 19, 1989; her pictorial memoir, Enchanted Cornwall, appeared posthumously in 1992.