Angus MacPhail


Angus Roy MacPhail was an English screenwriter who was active from the late 1920s onwards. He is best remembered for his work with Alfred Hitchcock and for coining the term "MacGuffin".

Early life and education

The s of the merchant clerk Angus MacPhail and Fanny Maud, he was born in Lewisham, London, and educated at Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he studied English and edited Granta. At Cambridge, he was a close friend of fellow Old Westminsters Ivor Montagu, later a filmmaker, who described MacPhail as "a red-haired and rather gauche Scot from Blackheath", and Arnold Haskell, later a dance critic and headmaster of the Royal Ballet School.

Career

He began to work in the film business in 1926, writing subtitles for silent films. He began writing his scenarios for Gaumont British Studios and later Ealing Studios under Sir Michael Balcon. During World War II, he made films for the Ministry of Information. MacPhail wrote several screenplays for director Alfred Hitchcock. One of the latter's favourite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was what he called the "MacGuffin". His old friend Ivor Montagu, who worked with Hitchcock on several of his British films, attributes the coining of the term to MacPhail.
In 1929, MacPhail undertook early market research via mass questionnaires into film viewers' preferences on behalf of Sidney Bernstein.

Filmography