Alfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 in a flat above his parents' greengrocer shop in Leytonstone, Essex, now part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest. His childhood was defined by a strict Catholic household and a peculiar incident that would haunt him for the rest of his life. When he was five years old, his father sent him to the local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him up for a few minutes as a punishment. The policeman did exactly that, telling the young boy, This is what we do to naughty boys. The experience left Hitchcock with a lifelong phobia of law enforcement, a fear so profound that he told Tom Snyder in 1973 that he was scared stiff of anything to do with the law and would refuse to drive a car in case he got a parking ticket. This early trauma shaped his worldview and later influenced the recurring themes of mistaken identity and police incompetence in his films. He attended several schools, including the Salesian College in Battersea, where priests used a flat, hard, springy tool made of gutta-percha known as a ferula to punish students. The anticipation of this punishment at the end of the day instilled a sense of fear and organization in him, which he later credited to the Jesuits. He developed a fascination with maps and train timetables, often reciting all the stops on the Orient Express, a hobby that would later manifest in the rail scenes that appear in many of his movies, such as The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train.
The Silent Master Of Suspense
Hitchcock's entry into the film industry began in 1919 when he worked as a title card designer for Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures. He quickly moved from writing copy for electric cable advertisements to becoming a co-writer, art director, and production manager on at least 18 silent films. His directorial debut was The Pleasure Garden in 1925, a commercial flop that taught him valuable lessons about budgeting and logistics, including the need to declare film stock to customs and the difficulties of working with actors who were on their period. Despite the failure, he was praised as the Young man with a master mind by the Daily Express. His first true success came with The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog in 1927, a thriller about a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer that is considered the first British thriller. The film was influenced by German Expressionism, a style Hitchcock had observed while working in Germany, and it established his reputation as a director who could control every aspect of a production. He made his first cameo appearance in this film, sitting in a newsroom, a tradition he would continue throughout his career. The film also introduced the concept of the Hitchcock blonde, a character type that would become a staple of his work. He married Alma Reville, who was born just hours after him, on the 2nd of December 1926. She became his closest collaborator, writing or co-writing many of his films, including Shadow of a Doubt and The 39 Steps. Hitchcock's early sound films, such as Blackmail in 1929, were the first British talkies and showcased his ability to use sound to create tension, as seen in the scene where a gossipy woman stresses the word knife in her conversation with a woman suspected of murder.The British Spy And The American Deal
By 1935, Hitchcock had gained international recognition with The 39 Steps, a film that introduced the MacGuffin, a plot device that drives the story but has no narrative value in itself. The film starred Madeleine Carroll, the quintessential English Hitchcock blonde, and was based on a novel by John Buchan, who attended the premiere and said the film had improved on the book. Hitchcock followed this with a series of spy thrillers, including Sabotage and Secret Agent, which were loosely based on works by Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham. He became notorious for his pranks, such as hosting a dinner party where he dyed all the food blue and delivering a horse to the dressing room of his friend, actor Gerald du Maurier. His next major success was The Lady Vanishes in 1938, a train movie that was hailed as one of the greatest in the genre's golden era. The film starred Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood and saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director. By 1938, Hitchcock was aware that he had reached his peak in Britain and received numerous offers from producers in the United States. He turned them all down until producer David O. Selznick offered him a concrete proposal to make a film based on the sinking of the Lusitania, which was eventually shelved. Selznick persuaded Hitchcock to come to Hollywood, and in June 1938, Hitchcock sailed to New York aboard the RMS Queen Mary, where he was already a celebrity. He signed a seven-year contract with Selznick in April 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood, where they lived in a spacious flat on Wilshire Boulevard. Hitchcock's first American film was Rebecca in 1940, which won Best Picture at the 13th Academy Awards, though the statuette was given to producer Selznick. Hitchcock received his first nomination for Best Director, his first of five such nominations, and his career in Hollywood was off to a promising start.The War Years And The Shadow Of Doubt
During the war years, Hitchcock's films were diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith to the bleak film noir Shadow of a Doubt. He made several films that supported the British war effort, such as Foreign Correspondent, which was inspired by the rapidly changing events in Europe. In 1943, he wrote a mystery story for Look magazine, The Murder of Monty Woolley, which invited readers to find clues to the murderer's identity. That same year, he released Shadow of a Doubt, a film that he had fond memories of making. The story follows Charlotte Charlie Newton, who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley of being a serial killer. Hitchcock filmed extensively on location in Santa Rosa, California, and the film is considered one of his personal favorites. He also made Lifeboat, a film that was shot in a small boat in a studio water tank, and which featured his cameo appearance in a newspaper advertisement for Reduco-Obesity Slayer. Hitchcock's weight fluctuated considerably over the next 40 years, and he had to go on a strict diet to lose weight. In 1944, he returned to the UK to make two short propaganda films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, for the Ministry of Information. He also served as a treatment advisor on a Holocaust documentary that used Allied Forces footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The film, originally intended to be broadcast to the Germans, was deemed too traumatic to be shown to a shocked post-war population and remained unreleased until 1985, when an edited version was broadcast as an episode of PBS Frontline, under the title Memory of the Camps. The full-length version, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was restored in 2014 by scholars at the Imperial War Museum.The Golden Age Of Hollywood
Hitchcock's post-war years saw him produce some of his most iconic films, including Spellbound, Notorious, Rope, and Strangers on a Train. Spellbound, released in 1945, explored psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. The film starred Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, and its original musical score by Miklós Rózsa made use of the theremin. Notorious, released in 1946, was a spy film that featured Nazis, uranium, and South America, and it led to Hitchcock being briefly placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He formed an independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, with his friend Sidney Bernstein, and made two films with it, including Rope, which was his first color film. Rope was shot in 10 continuous shots, each ranging from 10 to 12 minutes, and it was inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Hitchcock's peak years began in 1954 with Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief, all of which starred Grace Kelly. Rear Window, released in 1954, starred James Stewart and Grace Kelly, and it was set in a confined space, a technique Hitchcock had used earlier in Lifeboat and Rope. The film is considered a classic, and it was the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. In 1955, Hitchcock became a United States citizen, and he began hosting the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which aired from 1955 to 1965. The series made Hitchcock a celebrity, and his introductions always included some sort of wry humor. The title sequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile, which he drew himself, and it was composed of only nine strokes. The series theme tune was Funeral March of a Marionette by the French composer Charles Gounod. Hitchcock's television series were very profitable, and his foreign-language versions of books were bringing revenues of up to $100,000 a year.The Birds And The Psycho Revolution
Hitchcock's later years were marked by some of his most controversial and successful films, including The Birds and Psycho. The Birds, released in 1963, was his most technically challenging film, using a combination of trained and mechanical birds against a backdrop of wild ones. Every shot was sketched in advance, and the film was shot in Bodega Bay, California. The question, What do the birds want? is left unanswered, and the film is considered a classic, though it attracted mixed reviews and poor box-office receipts at the time. Hitchcock's next film, Psycho, released in 1960, is arguably his best-known film. Based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a tight budget of $800,000 and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, and the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the hallmarks of a new horror-film genre. The film proved popular with audiences, with lines stretching outside theaters as viewers waited for the next showing. It broke box-office records in the United Kingdom, France, South America, the United States, and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period. Psycho was the most profitable of Hitchcock's career, and he personally earned in excess of $15 million. He subsequently swapped his rights to Psycho and his TV anthology for 150,000 shares of MCA, making him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at least, although that did not stop studio interference. Following the first film, Psycho became an American horror franchise, including Psycho II, Psycho III, Bates Motel, Psycho IV: The Beginning, and a color 1998 remake of the original.The Final Years And The Legacy
Hitchcock's final years were marked by failing health and a reduced output, but he still managed to produce some of his most memorable films, including Frenzy and Family Plot. Frenzy, released in 1972, was his penultimate film, and it marked a return to the murder-thriller genre. The film was based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, and it featured Richard Blaney, a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, who becomes the prime suspect in the investigation into the Necktie Murders. In Frenzy, Hitchcock allowed nudity for the first time, and two scenes show naked women, one of whom is being raped and strangled. Donald Spoto called the latter one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of film. Family Plot, released in 1976, was Hitchcock's last film, and it related the escapades of Madam Blanche Tyler, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi-driver lover Bruce Dern. The film was based on the Victor Canning novel The Rainbird Pattern, and it took a lighter, more comical tone than the original novel. Hitchcock's health was declining, and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a stroke. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1980 New Year Honours, and he was too ill to travel to London, so on the 3rd of January 1980, the British consul general presented him with the papers at Universal Studios. His last public appearance was on the 16th of March 1980, when he introduced the next year's winner of the American Film Institute award. He died of kidney failure on the 29th of April 1980, at his Bel Air home. His funeral was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills on the 30th of April, after which his body was cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean on the 10th of May. Hitchcock's legacy is immense, with 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, and nine of his films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. His psychological thriller Vertigo, starring James Stewart, displaced Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based on its worldwide poll of hundreds of film critics in 2012. He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, and was knighted in December of that year, four months before his death.Alfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 in a flat above his parents' greengrocer shop in Leytonstone, Essex, now part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest. His childhood was defined by a strict Catholic household and a peculiar incident that would haunt him for the rest of his life. When he was five years old, his father sent him to the local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him up for a few minutes as a punishment. The policeman did exactly that, telling the young boy, This is what we do to naughty boys. The experience left Hitchcock with a lifelong phobia of law enforcement, a fear so profound that he told Tom Snyder in 1973 that he was scared stiff of anything to do with the law and would refuse to drive a car in case he got a parking ticket. This early trauma shaped his worldview and later influenced the recurring themes of mistaken identity and police incompetence in his films. He attended several schools, including the Salesian College in Battersea, where priests used a flat, hard, springy tool made of gutta-percha known as a ferula to punish students. The anticipation of this punishment at the end of the day instilled a sense of fear and organization in him, which he later credited to the Jesuits. He developed a fascination with maps and train timetables, often reciting all the stops on the Orient Express, a hobby that would later manifest in the rail scenes that appear in many of his movies, such as The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train.
The Silent Master Of Suspense
Hitchcock's entry into the film industry began in 1919 when he worked as a title card designer for Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures. He quickly moved from writing copy for electric cable advertisements to becoming a co-writer, art director, and production manager on at least 18 silent films. His directorial debut was The Pleasure Garden in 1925, a commercial flop that taught him valuable lessons about budgeting and logistics, including the need to declare film stock to customs and the difficulties of working with actors who were on their period. Despite the failure, he was praised as the Young man with a master mind by the Daily Express. His first true success came with The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog in 1927, a thriller about a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer that is considered the first British thriller. The film was influenced by German Expressionism, a style Hitchcock had observed while working in Germany, and it established his reputation as a director who could control every aspect of a production. He made his first cameo appearance in this film, sitting in a newsroom, a tradition he would continue throughout his career. The film also introduced the concept of the Hitchcock blonde, a character type that would become a staple of his work. He married Alma Reville, who was born just hours after him, on the 2nd of December 1926. She became his closest collaborator, writing or co-writing many of his films, including Shadow of a Doubt and The 39 Steps. Hitchcock's early sound films, such as Blackmail in 1929, were the first British talkies and showcased his ability to use sound to create tension, as seen in the scene where a gossipy woman stresses the word knife in her conversation with a woman suspected of murder.
The British Spy And The American Deal
By 1935, Hitchcock had gained international recognition with The 39 Steps, a film that introduced the MacGuffin, a plot device that drives the story but has no narrative value in itself. The film starred Madeleine Carroll, the quintessential English Hitchcock blonde, and was based on a novel by John Buchan, who attended the premiere and said the film had improved on the book. Hitchcock followed this with a series of spy thrillers, including Sabotage and Secret Agent, which were loosely based on works by Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham. He became notorious for his pranks, such as hosting a dinner party where he dyed all the food blue and delivering a horse to the dressing room of his friend, actor Gerald du Maurier. His next major success was The Lady Vanishes in 1938, a train movie that was hailed as one of the greatest in the genre's golden era. The film starred Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood and saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director. By 1938, Hitchcock was aware that he had reached his peak in Britain and received numerous offers from producers in the United States. He turned them all down until producer David O. Selznick offered him a concrete proposal to make a film based on the sinking of the Lusitania, which was eventually shelved. Selznick persuaded Hitchcock to come to Hollywood, and in June 1938, Hitchcock sailed to New York aboard the RMS Queen Mary, where he was already a celebrity. He signed a seven-year contract with Selznick in April 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood, where they lived in a spacious flat on Wilshire Boulevard. Hitchcock's first American film was Rebecca in 1940, which won Best Picture at the 13th Academy Awards, though the statuette was given to producer Selznick. Hitchcock received his first nomination for Best Director, his first of five such nominations, and his career in Hollywood was off to a promising start.
The War Years And The Shadow Of Doubt
During the war years, Hitchcock's films were diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith to the bleak film noir Shadow of a Doubt. He made several films that supported the British war effort, such as Foreign Correspondent, which was inspired by the rapidly changing events in Europe. In 1943, he wrote a mystery story for Look magazine, The Murder of Monty Woolley, which invited readers to find clues to the murderer's identity. That same year, he released Shadow of a Doubt, a film that he had fond memories of making. The story follows Charlotte Charlie Newton, who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley of being a serial killer. Hitchcock filmed extensively on location in Santa Rosa, California, and the film is considered one of his personal favorites. He also made Lifeboat, a film that was shot in a small boat in a studio water tank, and which featured his cameo appearance in a newspaper advertisement for Reduco-Obesity Slayer. Hitchcock's weight fluctuated considerably over the next 40 years, and he had to go on a strict diet to lose weight. In 1944, he returned to the UK to make two short propaganda films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, for the Ministry of Information. He also served as a treatment advisor on a Holocaust documentary that used Allied Forces footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The film, originally intended to be broadcast to the Germans, was deemed too traumatic to be shown to a shocked post-war population and remained unreleased until 1985, when an edited version was broadcast as an episode of PBS Frontline, under the title Memory of the Camps. The full-length version, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was restored in 2014 by scholars at the Imperial War Museum.
The Golden Age Of Hollywood
Hitchcock's post-war years saw him produce some of his most iconic films, including Spellbound, Notorious, Rope, and Strangers on a Train. Spellbound, released in 1945, explored psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. The film starred Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, and its original musical score by Miklós Rózsa made use of the theremin. Notorious, released in 1946, was a spy film that featured Nazis, uranium, and South America, and it led to Hitchcock being briefly placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He formed an independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, with his friend Sidney Bernstein, and made two films with it, including Rope, which was his first color film. Rope was shot in 10 continuous shots, each ranging from 10 to 12 minutes, and it was inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Hitchcock's peak years began in 1954 with Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief, all of which starred Grace Kelly. Rear Window, released in 1954, starred James Stewart and Grace Kelly, and it was set in a confined space, a technique Hitchcock had used earlier in Lifeboat and Rope. The film is considered a classic, and it was the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. In 1955, Hitchcock became a United States citizen, and he began hosting the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which aired from 1955 to 1965. The series made Hitchcock a celebrity, and his introductions always included some sort of wry humor. The title sequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile, which he drew himself, and it was composed of only nine strokes. The series theme tune was Funeral March of a Marionette by the French composer Charles Gounod. Hitchcock's television series were very profitable, and his foreign-language versions of books were bringing revenues of up to $100,000 a year.
The Birds And The Psycho Revolution
Hitchcock's later years were marked by some of his most controversial and successful films, including The Birds and Psycho. The Birds, released in 1963, was his most technically challenging film, using a combination of trained and mechanical birds against a backdrop of wild ones. Every shot was sketched in advance, and the film was shot in Bodega Bay, California. The question, What do the birds want? is left unanswered, and the film is considered a classic, though it attracted mixed reviews and poor box-office receipts at the time. Hitchcock's next film, Psycho, released in 1960, is arguably his best-known film. Based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a tight budget of $800,000 and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, and the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the hallmarks of a new horror-film genre. The film proved popular with audiences, with lines stretching outside theaters as viewers waited for the next showing. It broke box-office records in the United Kingdom, France, South America, the United States, and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period. Psycho was the most profitable of Hitchcock's career, and he personally earned in excess of $15 million. He subsequently swapped his rights to Psycho and his TV anthology for 150,000 shares of MCA, making him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at least, although that did not stop studio interference. Following the first film, Psycho became an American horror franchise, including Psycho II, Psycho III, Bates Motel, Psycho IV: The Beginning, and a color 1998 remake of the original.
The Final Years And The Legacy
Hitchcock's final years were marked by failing health and a reduced output, but he still managed to produce some of his most memorable films, including Frenzy and Family Plot. Frenzy, released in 1972, was his penultimate film, and it marked a return to the murder-thriller genre. The film was based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, and it featured Richard Blaney, a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, who becomes the prime suspect in the investigation into the Necktie Murders. In Frenzy, Hitchcock allowed nudity for the first time, and two scenes show naked women, one of whom is being raped and strangled. Donald Spoto called the latter one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of film. Family Plot, released in 1976, was Hitchcock's last film, and it related the escapades of Madam Blanche Tyler, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi-driver lover Bruce Dern. The film was based on the Victor Canning novel The Rainbird Pattern, and it took a lighter, more comical tone than the original novel. Hitchcock's health was declining, and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a stroke. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1980 New Year Honours, and he was too ill to travel to London, so on the 3rd of January 1980, the British consul general presented him with the papers at Universal Studios. His last public appearance was on the 16th of March 1980, when he introduced the next year's winner of the American Film Institute award. He died of kidney failure on the 29th of April 1980, at his Bel Air home. His funeral was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills on the 30th of April, after which his body was cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean on the 10th of May. Hitchcock's legacy is immense, with 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, and nine of his films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. His psychological thriller Vertigo, starring James Stewart, displaced Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based on its worldwide poll of hundreds of film critics in 2012. He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, and was knighted in December of that year, four months before his death.