Daphne du Maurier

British · 1907 to 1989

Born Daphne du Maurier on May 13, 1907, at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and the actress Muriel Beaumont, she grew up in a theatrical household visited by Tallulah Bankhead and Edgar Wallace and was a first cousin of the Llewelyn Davies boys who had inspired Peter Pan. Her grandfather George du Maurier had written Trilby. She was educated by governesses in Hampstead and at a Paris finishing school, and from her teens spent every summer in Fowey, Cornwall, where the river, the moors, and the abandoned Menabilly house sank into her imagination. She published her first novel, The Loving Spirit, at twenty-four. In 1932 she married the army officer Frederick "Boy" Browning and bore three children, though her marriage was cool and her closest attachments were with women. Rebecca (1938), the story of an unnamed young bride at Manderley overshadowed by her dead predecessor, sold nearly three million copies in her lifetime and was filmed by Hitchcock in 1940. Hitchcock also adapted Jamaica Inn (1936) and her short story The Birds (1952), and Nicolas Roeg filmed her novella Don't Look Now (1971). My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957), and the historical novels of Cornwall followed. She leased Menabilly for twenty-six years and finally moved to Kilmarth, the setting of The House on the Strand, after her husband's death in 1965. She was made a Dame in 1969. She died at Kilmarth, near Par in Cornwall, on April 19, 1989, at the age of eighty-one, having stopped eating in the months before the end.