#Pat Hitchcock, actress daughter of Alfred, dead at 93

Patricia “Pat” Hitchcock, a veteran character actress perhaps best-known for offering Janet Leigh’s wound-tight “Psycho” character a tranquilizer, has died. She was 93.

Born on July 7, 1928 in the UK to famed film director Alfred Hitchcock and his infamously loyal wife, Alma Reville, the legendary duo’s offspring would go on to appear in a string of her pop’s projects including “Stage Fright” (1950), “Strangers on a Train” (1951) and the aforementioned “Psycho” (1960). She also guest-starred in 10 episodes of the classic TV anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” from 1955 to 1960.

Her daughter, Katie O’Connell-Fiala, confirmed that Hitchcock died Monday in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Variety reported.

Hitchcock relocated to Hollywood in 1939 from her birthplace of South Kensington when her father was contracted to direct David O. Selznick’s Oscar-winning “Rebecca.”

She often credited her mother for her controversial father’s iconic career in film.

“My mother was the one who really was in on everything from the very beginning. When he would find a story that he was anxious to do, he would have her read it,” Hitchcock revealed in the documentary “The Making of ‘Psycho’” in 1997. “If she didn’t think it would make a picture, he didn’t touch it. Then she would be the first one to read the treatment and the screenplay, and she was even in on a lot of the casting, too. When she died, Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times said: ‘The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two of them were Alma’s.’ “

Hitchcock later co-wrote the 2003 biography of her mother, “Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man,” with Laurent Bouzereau.

She launched her acting career as a young actress in the 1942 Broadway production of “Solitaire,” followed Great White Way runs in 1944’s “Violet” and “The High Ground” in 1951.

The actress also branched out from her dad’s directorial hand to appear in films such as 1949’s “The Case of Thomas Pyke,” as well as “Golden Age” ’50s television series such as “My Little Margie,” “Suspense,” “Matinee Theatre” and “The Life of Riley.”

Her she mostly retired from acting to raise her children in the 1970s, when she appeared in TV movies-of-the-week “Skateboard,” “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and “Ladies of the Corridor.”

Hitchcock was predeceased by her husband, Joseph E. O’Connell, Jr., in 1994. She is survived by three daughters: Mary Stone, Tere Carrubba and Katie, an attorney at Amblin Partners, the production company successor to the live-action counterpart of DreamWorks.