ON FILM: Daphne du Maurier adaptations

My Cousin Rachel (6.10pm, Sky Premiere) is adapted from a Daphne du Maurier novel. It’s not the first time the prolific writer’s work has been adapted for the big screen…

Alfred Hitchcock brought du Maurier’s work to the big screen three times. First, an adaptation of Jamaica Inn (1939) – a project he and the writer disowned. Rebecca (1940) was far more successul. Starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier (left), it was a triumphant marriage of the writer’s moral complexity and Hitchcock’s Gothic imagery. More than two decades later, Hitch adapted The Birds (1963). This time, du Maurier was nonplussed by the director’s drastic changes to her 1952 short story. Du Maurier also wrote historical novels and family sagas. In Frenchman’s Creek (1944), Joan Fontaine is the society lady finding adventure on the Cornish coast (where du Maurier made her home). Margaret Lockwood is the leading lady in Hungry Hill (1947), another du Maurier bestseller that was promptly made into a film.

Don’t Look Now (1973) was the film based on her work that du Maurier’s liked the most. Nicolas Roeg’s chilling drama is set in Venice and stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as parents whose grief over their daughter’s death manifests in disturbing visions. Before the current film starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin (right), there was a 1952 adaptation of My Cousin

Rachel, starring Richard Burton, and Olivia de

Havilland in the title role.