Rediscovering Helen Scott

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

History is filled with secret heroes whose behind-the-scenes actions are essential to the exploits of public-facing heroes. Bringing these figures out of the shadows is a key role of historians. Helen Scott is one of those hidden heroines. Scott was the American film publicist, then translator, best known as François Truffaut’s collaborator on his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. Her extraordinary, lifelong range of activities, in and out of movies, is matched by her literary depth of character. The writer who brought Scott’s life and work to light is one of Truffaut’s biographers, Serge Toubiana, who wrote a fascinating, fervently researched biography of Scott, titled “L’amie Américaine” (“The American Friend”), published in 2020. Toubiana also edited “Mon Petit Truffe, Ma Grande Scottie,” a collection of the correspondence between Scott and Truffaut, from 1960 to 1965, that came out in May.

more here.