Joan Harrison (screenwriter)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Joan Harrison (20 June 1907 – 14 August 1994) was an English screenwriter and producer who worked closely with Alfred Hitchcock. She was the first woman nominated for Best Original Screenplay when the Oscars started that category in 1940, and in the same year she earned two nominations for Foreign Correspondent (original) and Rebecca (adapted), both directed by Hitchcock.

Born in Guildford, England, Harrison was the daughter of a newspaper publisher. She studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and at the Sorbonne, and she reviewed films for the student newspaper. In 1933 she became Hitchcock's secretary and soon became one of his most trusted collaborators, helping with scripts and ideas. She contributed to Jamaica Inn (1939) and later to several Hitchcock films: Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Saboteur (1942).

Harrison became a film producer with Phantom Lady (1944) and produced other films such as The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Nocturne (1946), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), and They Won't Believe Me (1947). She also did uncredited writing on Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and Your Witness (1950). In television, she worked with Hitchcock on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and later on Journey to the Unknown (1968).

She married writer Eric Ambler in 1958, and they lived in London for the last years of her life. Harrison died in London in 1994 at the age of 87. A 2020 biography called Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock, covers her story.