Respect and admiration for Pat Hitchcock, the plucky acting daughter of director Alfred Hitchcock who’s left us at age 93.

Born in England in 1928, Pat moved to Los Angeles in 1939 with her father and mother, Alma Reville. She was their only child, and man, what a life she lived — a first-hand family witness and occasional creative participant in one of the greatest and most legendary Hollywood careers of all time, and a major keeper of the Hitchcock flame in her retirement years.

Pat’s most significant role by far was as the tart-tounged Barbara Morton, the daughter of Leo G. Carroll‘s decorum-minded Senator Morton. (One of the film’s best lines is the Senator saying to Barbara, “One doesn’t always have to say what one thinks.”) Barbara’s resemblance to the murdered wife of tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) triggers a homicidal trance in Robert Walker‘s Bruno Antony — one of Stranger‘s most chilling scenes.

Pat also played a chatty office assistant in the opening act of Psycho, talking to Janet Leigh‘s Marion Crane about tranquilizers, her husband Teddy, her mother and who called who.

Pat participated in numerous Universal-funded documentaries about her father’s films, many of them produced by Laurent Bouzereau.

Until today I never knew that Pat played a “court lady” in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments. I tried finding a screen grab of her in costume — zip.