Charles Laughton Wrath" (US title "The Beachcomber") (1938), based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, in which his wife, Elsa Lanchester, co-starred; "St. Martin's Lane" (US title "Sidewalks of London"), about London street entertainers, which featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and "Jamaica Inn", with Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton, about Cornish shipwreckers, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. The films produced were not commercially successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy only when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role (Quasimodo)
George du Maurier the novel, is known to this day as a "trilby". The plot inspired Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel "Phantom of the Opera" and the innumerable works derived from it. Du Maurier eventually came to dislike the persistent attention given to his novel. The third novel was a long, largely autobiographical work entitled "The Martian", only published posthumously in 1896. George du Maurier was a close friend of Henry James, the novelist; their relationship was fictionalised in David Lodge's "Author, Author". He was buried in St John-at-Hampstead churchyard in Hampstead parish in London. George du Maurier George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier