Trivia / The Lady Vanishes

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Michael Redgrave actually did go to Cambridge, just like his character, Gilbert. He was also a chorister and took singing lessons early on in his career, which gives all the more credibility to Gilbert's statement that he has "a powerful voice".
  • Similarly, Basil Radford was a World War I veteran, as Charters certainly appears to be given his actions in the film's climax.
• Breakout Character: Charters and Caldicott went on to appear in Night Train to Munich, Crooks Tour and Millions Like Us, with their actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne playing Expies in eight additional films. In the 1980s, they even got their own Setting Update TV series (played by different actors, of course).
• Breakthrough Hit: For Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Alfred Hitchcock owed producer Edward Black one final film, and had trouble finding a script. Black offered him this film, which he'd placed in Development Hell after an earlier attempt to make it got stalled.
• Dawson Casting: The "middle-aged" Miss Froy was played by 73-year-old May Whitty.
• Hostility on the Set: There was friction between Michael Redgrave, who, with his stage background, wanted to rehearse as much as possible, and Alfred Hitchcock, who preferred a looser approach to acting. Despite this film being a Star-Making Role for Redgrave, he never worked with Hitchcock again.
• Inspiration for the Work: In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred Hitchcock revealed that the plot was inspired by a legend of an Englishwoman who went with her daughter to the Palace Hotel in Paris in the 1880s, at the time of the Great Exposition:
  The woman was taken sick and they sent the girl across Paris to get some medicine in a horse-vehicle, so it took about four hours. When she came back she asked, "How's my mother?" "What mother?" "My mother. She's here, she's in her room. Room 22". They go up there. Different room, different wallpaper, everything. And the payoff of the whole story is, so the legend goes, that the woman had bubonic plague and they dared not let anybody know she died, otherwise all of Paris would have emptied.
• Orphaned Reference: In the original cut, as seen in the 25th Anniversary national re-release of 1963, Charters and Caldicott have to share the same pair of pajamas in the hotel after Charters has accidentally dropped his in the water jug. In later years and showings, this innocent preamble has been snipped out, and there is a cut straight to them in bed together. Though we can still see Charters' pajamas hanging up to dry, the explanation has disappeared.
• Star-Making Role: For Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.
• What Could Have Been: Vivien Leigh tested for the role of Iris Henderson. Nova Pilbeam and Lilli Palmer (both of whom had starred in previous Hitchcock films) were also considered.
• Working Title: The Lost Lady.

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