Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier

Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, was an English novelist, biographer, and playwright born on 13 May 1907 in Regent’s Park, London. She grew up in a family already steeped in performance and print. Her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, her mother was the actress Muriel Beaumont, and her grandfather George du Maurier was a Punch cartoonist and the author of Trilby. Her uncle Guy du Maurier was a playwright, and her sisters Angela and Jeanne became, respectively, an actress and writer, and a painter.

The theatre was part of du Maurier’s childhood. Because of her father’s fame, she met well-known actors from an early age, including Tallulah Bankhead, whom she later described as the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. She spent her childhood at Cannon Hall in Hampstead and her summers in Fowey, Cornwall, where the family also lived during the war years. Cornwall became central to her life and work. She spent much of her life there, and many of her books are set there.

Du Maurier became best known for fiction that moved easily from page to screen. Her major works include the novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), and My Cousin Rachel (1951), along with the short stories “The Birds” (1952) and “Don’t Look Now” (1971). Alfred Hitchcock adapted Jamaica Inn in 1939, Rebecca in 1940, and The Birds in 1963. Other notable film versions include Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Roger Michell’s My Cousin Rachel (2017), and Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca (2020).

In 1932 she married Major Frederick “Boy” Browning, later Lieutenant-General Browning. They had three children: Tessa, Flavia, and Christian. She continued to write as Daphne du Maurier during her marriage, though after her husband was knighted in 1946 she was also known as Lady Browning. In 1969 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, but she never used the title and told no one about the honour; even her children learned of it from the newspapers.

Those close to du Maurier saw more than one side of her. She was often described as private, rarely giving interviews and mixing little in society as her fame grew. Yet many remembered her as warm, very funny, and a generous hostess at Menabilly, the Cornish house she leased for many years. In private correspondence released by her family, she wrote of feeling that her personality held two distinct parts: the loving wife and mother shown to the world, and a hidden “decidedly male energy” that she believed powered her writing. Her memoirs also said that, because her father had wanted a son, she became a tomboy in search of the approval she might have received as a boy.

After her husband’s death in 1965, du Maurier moved to Kilmarth near Par, Cornwall, which became the setting for The House on the Strand. She was an early member of Mebyon Kernow, a Cornish nationalist party. She died of heart failure in her sleep on 19 April 1989 at her home in Par, aged 81. By then, her novels and stories had reached readers and film audiences across decades. People still return to her words because they are rooted in place, privacy, family feeling, and the divided self she understood so closely.