C. A. Lejeune

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.

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.

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.

In the postwar years she was also a television critic for a time, and she adapted books for the medium, writing scripts for the BBC's Sherlock Holmes television series (1951), Clementina and The Three Hostages Lejeune's film reviews have long been compared to those of Dilys Powell, whose criticism for The Sunday Times overlapped for about 21 years with Lejeune's commentary for The Observer.

Everything she has written, I am sure, has come as much from her heart as her head, and the high quality of her writing, and the standard of film-making she encourages, have made her work a part of cinema history.