Madeleine Carroll: The story of the first ‘Hitchcock Blonde’
Like any auteur, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t debut with a fully-formed idea of the tricks, techniques, and signatures he’d repeatedly implement to change the face of cinema, and neither could Madeleine Carroll have imagined that she’d become the benchmark for one of the director’s favourite tropes.
Already an experienced performer on stage and screen, Carroll’s first encounter with the ‘Master of Suspense’ came when she starred alongside Miles Lander in 1928’s silent drama The First Born. The script was co-written by Alma Reville, who had married Hitchcock two years earlier.
It would be another seven years before they worked together—with Carroll keeping plenty busy in the interim—but little could she have known the transformative impact she would have on all of cinema when she was drafted in by Hitchcock to play the role of Pamela in The 39 Steps.
The classic espionage thriller may have starred Robert Donat in the lead role of Richard Hannay, and Lucie Mannheim as the murdered Annabella Smith, but it was Carroll’s character who made a monumental impact on the way Hitchcock approached his filmography from then on out.
As reductive as it sounds to say that Carroll set the template because she was a cold, calculating, and charismatic female in one of the director’s movies who also happened to be blonde, it also hits the nail rather neatly on the head looking at what was to follow.
For the remainder of his days, Hitchcock would become increasingly intertwined with his signature blondes, even if their personal and professional relationships regularly became a source of ire among certain parties. Carroll was the first, the trendsetter, and the trailblazer, and some of Hollywood’s most famous actors would go on to follow in her wake.
Grace Kelly in Dial M For Murder, Rear Window and To Catch A Thief, Saboteur‘s Priscilla Lane, Kim Novak in Vertigo, Tippi Hedren in The Birds, Eva Marie Smith in North by Northwest, and Psycho‘s Janet Leigh all fulfilled the filmmaker’s desire to inhabit as many of his pictures as possible with an attractive blonde, and while the archetype was fine-tuned over the years, Carroll’s contributions shouldn’t go overlooked.
The international success of The 39 Steps soon had Hollywood knocking at her door, and she was one of the first British starlets to be offered a studio contract. Signing up with Paramount Pictures, she bounded between her original contractor, 20th Century Fox, and Columbia Pictures, where she’d work with David O. Selznick, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Sterling Hayden, and Bob Hope, to name just a few.
Carroll undoubtedly enjoyed a stellar career, but it’s hard to outrun the shadow cast by Hitchcock. She may not have had any inkling at the time The 39 Steps was being filmed, but she’d ultimately be enshrined in history as the catalyst for one of the most unmistakable tropes to hail from one of cinema’s most legendary creative minds.
