Alfred Hitchcock's debut US film stars Joan Fontaine as a young woman who, after a brief Monte Carlo courtship and a rushed marriage, returns with the handsome and mysterious Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) to his Cornish country estate, Manderlay. The new bride receives a hostile reaction from the housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), and finds herself intimidated and overcome by the surviving traces of de Winter's first wife, Rebecca. Then, as she becomes more and more unhappy, she stumbles upon the secret of Rebecca's death.