She knew early success as a writer and commanded a wide readership throughout her career, with bestsellers such as The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand and, of course, Rebecca, which Hitchcock also filmed. Although she never owned it, she adored Menabilly and raised her family there. This may explain the author's dislike of the film.ĭu Maurier was born, on May 13 1907, into a distinguished London theatrical family but lived in Cornwall for most of her life, in a rambling romantic house near the sea called Menabilly. The combination of bleak landscape and rustic characters lends an appropriately elemental tone to the tale, and this is missing from Hitchcock's version, with its placid northern California setting and the urbane city folk he casts as his protagonists. At the centre of du Maurier's narrative is a part-time farm worker called Nat Hocken, and in the story his struggle to protect his family from the birds is set against a wild Cornish coastline where gales sweep across stark hills and fields and isolated farmhouses. The difference between the story and the film is striking, though less in the depiction of the birds' inexplicably aggressive behaviour than in the characters who confront it, and where it all happens. She was baffled as to why the great director had distorted it as he had. A pparently Daphne du Maurier hated Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of her story "The Birds".
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