Daphne Du Maurier

Daphne Du Maurier was born on May 13, 1907 in UK. Daphne Du Maurier's big-screen debut came with Jamaica Inn directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939. Daphne Du Maurier is known for The Scapegoat directed by Charles Sturridge, Matthew Rhys stars as John and Eileen Atkins as Lady Spence. The upcoming new movie Daphne Du Maurier plays is Rebecca which will be released on Oct 21, 2020.

Daphne Du Maurier was one of the most popular English writers of the 20th Century, when middle-brow genre fiction was accorded a higher level of respect in a more broadly literate age. For her services to literature, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, the female equivalent of a knighthood. Thus, she achieved a trifecta of sorts, as her father and her husband were both knights.She was born on May 13, 1907 in London, the second daughter of the famous actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, who himself was knighted in 1922, and the actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was the famous anglo-French writer George L. Du Maurier, the creator of Svengali in his 1894 novel "Trilby". (She was also cousin to the Llewelyn Davies boys, through her grandfather Gerald. The boys were the inspiration for the boys in J.M. Barrie' Peter Pan (1924) and his Neverland works.) Her husband was also famous: Frederick A. M. Browning, the WWII Commander "Boy" Browning renowned as the "father of the British airborne forces." He helped plan and execute Operation Market Garden, an airborne operation that put Allied troops into Germany and the Netherlands, an ultimately unsuccessful venture chronicled in Cornelius Ryan's Un pont trop loin (1977). During the Second World War, Boy Browning achieved the rank of Lieutenant General and a knighthood. Browning's quote that Arnheim was a bridge too far later became famous as a book title and ultimately a movie title. Daphne published her first short story in 1928; her first novel, "The Loving Spirit", was published in 1931, and her last, "Rule Britannia", forty-one year later. In between, she achieved her greatest success with the novel Rebecca (1940), which was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a classic film that won the Best Picture Oscar for 1940. Another novel, Ne vous retournez pas (1973), adapted by Nicolas Roeg, is also considered a classic film in Britain.Along with "Rebecca", she had great successes with her novels La taverne de la Jamaïque (1939) and L'aventure vient de la mer (1944), both of which were adapted into movies. The three novels were set in Cornwall, where she lived. In addition to multiple non-fiction books, Daphne Du Maurier also wrote three plays (including an adaptation of "Rebecca").She died on April 19, 1989, in Par in her beloved Cornwall, five weeks shy of her 82nd birthday.