Caroline Alice Lejeune (27 March 1897 – 31 March 1973) was a British writer, best known for serving as the film critic for The Observer from 1928 to 1960. She was among the earliest newspaper film critics in Britain, and one of the first British women in the profession. She formed an enduring friendship early in her career with Alfred Hitchcock, “when he was writing and ornamenting sub-titles for silent pictures,” as she later wrote. Family C. A. Lejeune was born on 27 March 1897 in Didsbury, Manchester, the youngest in a large family of eight children that eventually resided at 10 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester. Her father, Adam Edward Lejeune, born in Frankfurt in 1845 of Huguenot ancestry, was a cotton merchant who had come to England after doing business in Frankfurt. He died at Zurich, Switzerland on October 28, 1899 when his daughter was two years old. Her mother, Jane Louisa, who was the daughter of the Nonconformist minister Dr Alexander Maclaren, was a friend of C. P. Scott and of Caroline Herford, who was Caroline's godmother and Headmistress of Lady Barn House School, where Caroline received her elementary education. She and four of her sisters (Franziska, Marion, Juliet and Hélène) received their secondary education at Withington Girls' School, of which their mother, Scott, and Caroline Herford were among the founders. After leaving school, unlike her sisters, she rejected her place at Oxford University and studied English Literature instead at the Victoria University of Manchester. Journalism and other writing Partly through her mother's friendship with Scott, Caroline found work writing for The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian), initially as a music critic. Her main interests were in Gilbert and Sullivan, Verdi, and Puccini. However, she was increasingly excited by the cinema, which was increasingly patronized by a cross-class audience by the late 1910s. Her first Guardian contribution on film compared the "beauty of line" that she saw in Douglas Fairbanks's swashbuckling performance in The Mark of Zorro (1920) with the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. With her mother accompanying her, she moved to London in 1921 and the next year she began writing a column for the paper called "The Week on the Screen". It was about this time that she befriended Hitchcock. In 1925 she married Edward Roffe Thompson, a psychologist and journalist. (Their home at Lane End was near her mother's home in Pinner.) Their son,