Joan Harrison (screenwriter)

Joan Harrison (26 June 1907 – 14 August 1994) was an English screenwriter and producer for motion pictures and television.

Joan Harrison, second from left, at dinner with the Hitchcocks (August 24, 1937)

Born in Guildford, Surrey, Harrison studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford and reviewed films for the student newspaper. She also studied at the Sorbonne. In 1933 Harrison became the secretary of Alfred Hitchcock. Eventually she began reading books and scripts for him and became one of Hitchcock's most trusted associates.

Harrison appears in a scene in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), eating dinner with Peter Lorre's character. When Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in March 1939 to begin his contract with David O. Selznick to direct films, Harrison went with him as an assistant and writer.

She gained the title of screenwriter when she wrote the film Jamaica Inn (1939) based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Harrison continued writing screenplays for films Rebecca (1940), also adapted from a du Maurier novel, Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Dark Waters (1944), and Nocturne (1946).

Harrison was an uncredited screenwriter for Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and Your Witness (1950). She became a film producer in 1944 with Phantom Lady, and produced such films as The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Nocturne (1946), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), and They Won't Believe Me (1947). At the time she was one of only three female producers in Hollywood, the others being Virginia Van Upp and Harriet Parsons.

Harrison worked in television with Hitchcock together with Norman Lloyd when she produced his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She and Lloyd were later producers on the Hammer TV anthology Journey to the Unknown, which ran for a single season in 1968.

Harrison married author Eric Ambler in 1958 and remained married to him until her death in 1994.