‘Pure Hitchcock’

Hitchcock Found Religion in Final Days

His priest insists, despite biographers saying otherwise.

Mark Henninger, a Jesuit priest who led mass for Alfred Hitchcock in the filmmaker’s final days, can clearly recall the religious services performed in Hitchcock’s study. But Henninger writes in The Wall Street Journal on Friday that the 81-year-old man who would cry during communion is a far cry from the unflattering portrait being painted of the director in recent biographies and Hollywood productions. Despite recent assertions that Hitchcock refused to see a priest in his final days, Henninger writes, “Weighing one's life with its share of wounds suffered and inflicted in such a perspective, and seeking reconciliation with an experienced and forgiving God, strikes me as profoundly human.”