Rear Window

Jennifer O’Callaghan’s Rear Window, subtitled “The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece,” was published by Citadel on September 30, 2025. Its subject is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film, which stars Grace Kelly and James Stewart. The publisher’s description in the Open Library record aims the book at film buffs, classic-movie fans, Hitchcock followers of any age and readers of Hollywood insider history. The Open Library record gives 272 pages, and the Google Books record gives 282.

Open Library lists 15 other books about Kelly, and O’Callaghan’s is the newest. They run from Marjorie P. K. Weiser’s Grace Kelly (1970) to Donald Spoto’s High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly (2009), so it appeared 16 years after the latest of them. The listing files 14 of the 15 as biographies and James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987) as a memoir. O’Callaghan’s book is also filed as a biography, but it is the only one of the 16 whose title names Hitchcock. Its Open Library subject headings include Hitchcock, the 1954 film, “semi-biographical,” “tell-all” and “Behind the Scenes.” Kelly is not among those headings.

For fans

The publisher’s account

The descriptions in the Open Library and Google Books records both come from the publisher, which calls the book “definitive” and says the film turned generations of viewers into “a race of Peeping Toms.” According to the publisher, O’Callaghan worked from the original papers of three people: Thelma Ritter, Jimmy Stewart and Hitchcock. The description promises an account of why accepting the part of Lisa Fremont ranked among the hardest choices of Kelly’s life. It also names Ingrid Bergman as an inspiration for the way Hitchcock combined romance and suspense. It says a topless scene served to draw the censors away from other material, and that Hitchcock based the villain, Lars Thorwald, on David O. Selznick, a producer he is said to have loathed. The publisher also describes the film’s confined viewpoint, from inside a Greenwich Village apartment, as “an unusual gamble” in the years of the Blacklist and the Hays Code.

Kelly and Lisa Fremont in Wikipedia’s account

Wikipedia’s entry on Grace Kelly puts the decision differently from the publisher, saying she “unhesitatingly” refused On the Waterfront and played Lisa Fremont instead. The entry reports Kelly’s recollection that Hitchcock talked to her about Rear Window throughout the making of Dial M for Murder, before her casting had been discussed. It describes Lisa Fremont, a wealthy Manhattan socialite and fashion model, as unlike the women Kelly had played before and as her first independent career woman. Variety’s critic, quoted there on the film’s opening in October 1954, noted an “earthy quality” in the relationship between Stewart and Kelly. The entry adds that Kelly wrote a foreword to Spoto’s The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in appreciation of her three films with the director. Spoto later published the Kelly biography that O’Callaghan’s book now follows in the Open Library listing.