Donald Spoto, who has died aged 81, was a prolific American biographer who also chronicled the lives of several British stage and screen celebrities, among them Alfred Hitchcock and Laurence Olivier.Ī former Catholic monk and trained theologian who also wrote lives of Jesus Christ and St Francis of Assisi, Spoto applied considerable scholastic rigour to his subjects, and his talent for conjuring an intimacy with them was much admired.īut his default modus operandi was to mine the seamier side of the lives he examined, and in his notorious study of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius (1993), he disclosed aspects of the director’s personal life with shocked disapproval, boasting that the “intensely private, secretive Hitchcock eluded the serious biographer until now”, an assertion disputed by numerous reviewers.
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