In 1967 Dirk received a long letter from a complete stranger in the United States. The writer had by chance come across a magazine in which there were pictures of Dirk in his house on the Sussex border - the very house in which the writer herself had lived during the 1930s. It was an odd coincidence, not least because ‘Mrs X’ was a bookish intellectual with no interest in cinema, and certainly no knowledge that she had stumbled across one of the great film idols of the ‘50s and ‘60s. This was the beginning of a correspondence that was to continue for the five years until the death of ’Mrs X’ in 1972. She and Dirk never met.