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)
Daphne du Maurier affair with Gertrude Lawrence, as well as her attraction to Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her U.S. publisher Nelson Doubleday, were cited. Du Maurier stated in her memoirs that her father had wanted a son; being a tomboy, she wished to have been born a boy. "The Daphne du Maurier Companion", edited by Helen Taylor, includes Taylor's claims that du Maurier confessed to her in 1965 that she had had an incestuous relationship with her father and that he had been a violent alcoholic. In correspondence that her family released to biographer Margaret Forster, du Maurier explained to a trusted