Du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson [key], 1834–96, English artist and novelist, b. Paris of a French father and an English mother. He studied chemistry, but later turned to art for a livelihood. In spite of the loss of one eye when he was a young man, he became a successful illustrator and in 1864 joined the staff of Punch. His novels include Peter Ibbetson (1892), successfully dramatized in 1915 and later made into an opera by Deems Taylor (1931) and Trilby (1894), the story of a young model who becomes a great singer when hypnotized by the musician Svengali.
See biography by L. Ormond (1969).
Daphne Du Maurier, 1907–89, his granddaughter, was the author of several popular novels, including Jamaica Inn (1936), the best-selling Rebecca (1938; Alfred Hitchcock film, 1940), My Cousin Rachel (1951, film 1952), and The Scapegoat (1957). Collections of her short stories include The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1980, repr. 2005) and The Birds and Other Stories (2003); “The Birds,” first published in 1952, inspired another Hitchcock film (1963). She also wrote two memoirs, Gerald: A Portrait (1934), about her actor father, and The Du Mauriers (1937), and plays.
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