The movie version, which was not a huge success, has, if anything, become more controversial with the passage of time, with some critics now hailing it as a major film while others deplore its sexual politics, particularly given Tippi Hedren’s later statements about Hitchcock’s treatment of her.
Winston Graham (1908-2003) was born in Manchester, England, the son of a wealthy tea importer who died when Winston was still young. From an early age, Graham knew that he wanted to be a writer, and his mother supported him financially until his career as a novelist took off; the first of his more than fifty novels was published in 1934. Feeling that his real last name (Grime) would not look well on book covers, he used Graham as a pseudonym and eventually changed it officially. Graham is best known for his twelve Poldark novels, set in Cornwall, where he lived for thirty years, between 1783 and 1820, but he wrote numerous books with contemporary settings as well, including his 1961 novel Marnie, about a young woman who has deep-rooted psychological problems that cause her to steal from a series of employers. When Alfred Hitchcock became interested in a film version of the book, he rejected treatments by two writers he’d worked with before—Joseph Stefano, Psycho, and Evan Hunter, The Birds, before approving the work of Jay Presson Allen. Hunter had balked at including the marital rape scene featuring the story’s two central characters, Marnie; Tippi Hedren, and Mark; Sean Connery, but as Allen later told him, that scene was one of the main reasons Hitchcock was interested in the story. The movie version, which was not a huge success, has, if anything, become more controversial with the passage of time, with some critics now hailing it as a major film while others deplore its sexual politics, particularly given Tippi Hedren’s later statements about Hitchcock’s treatment of her. The film makes a number of changes from the novel’s plot, resetting it in various U.S. East Coast locales and altering some elements of the Marnie-Mark relationship and the novel’s first-person Marnie narration. Additionally, the key final revelation about Marnie’s mother is significantly different, and the book’s ending is considerably bleaker.