Although Hitchcock's preference for sophisticated blonde heroines did not really dominate the casting of his films before Grace Kelly in the mid-1950s, it has nevertheless tended to dominate the relevant discussions of his films. To my knowledge, only Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape makes a point of considering Hitchcock's brunettes alongside his blondes (Haskell 1974: 349-354). I shall follow her example, and indeed look at the full range of Hitchcock's heroines, albeit from the rather selective point of view of the implications of their hair colour. Feminist studies such as Tania Modleski's (1988) have explored in detail the characterisations of Hitchcock's heroines and the complexity of his own attitude towards them; my concern here is with his types of heroine, a set of classifications in which hair colour is crucial. My argument will be that although there is no question that the blondes are the most important figures overall, (a) there are different types of blondes and (b) the blondes themselves come into sharper focus when set against the brunettes, particularly in those films where Hitchcock includes both, as he does in all his late works. Equally, the brunettes themselves cover a wide range of different colours, and the variation there, too, can often be significant. Finally, there are even a few scattered redheads.

Blondes versus brunettes

Hitchcock's evolving attitude towards his preferred type of heroine may be traced in three articles reprinted in Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Gottlieb 1995), all dating from the English period. In ‘How I Choose My Heroines’ (1931), Hitchcock states that the heroine must appeal primarily to the female members of the audience. He argues against those ‘who assert that sex appeal is the most important quality’ of a screen actress in favour of actresses such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Betty Balfour, Pauline Frederick and Norma Talmadge, whose success relies not on sex appeal but on ‘the fact that they … appear in roles which … appeal to the best in human nature’ (Hitchcock 1931/1995: 73). In the second article, ‘Alfred Hitchcock Tells a Woman that Women Are a Nuisance’ (1935), Hitchcock is interviewed accusingly by Barbara J. Buchanan, who went to see him ‘to get to the bottom of (his) brutal disregard for glamour, loveinterest, sex-appeal, and all the other feminine attributes which the American director considers indispensable’.