Alfred Hitchcock

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE was an English film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Leytonstone, London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. He made his directorial debut with the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden. By 1960 Hitchcock had directed four films often ranked as the greatest of all time: Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho.

About Alfred Hitchcock in brief

Summary Alfred HitchcockSir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE was an English film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Leytonstone, London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraph-cable company. He made his directorial debut with the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden. His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, helped to shape the thriller genre. Two of his 1930s thrillers, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century. By 1960 Hitchcock had directed four films often ranked as the greatest of all time: Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted in December that year, four months before he died. In 2012, Vertigo replaced Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as the British Film Institute’s greatest film ever made based on its world-wide poll of hundreds of film critics. By 2018 eight of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt. He was awarded a knighthood in 1973, but never won the Best Director Academy Award. His films garnered 46 Oscar nominations and six wins. He was as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his movies, and his hosting and producing of the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Hitchcock said he could not remember ever having had a playmate. In 1973 he told Tom Snyder that he was’scared of policemen; in 1973 he wouldn’t even drive a car in case he got a ticket in a case’ According to Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock’s first film was How Conrah House in 1907, which he entered in 1907 to work in a fish-and-chips shop. He said that he first became class-conscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals. His parents, Emma Jane Hitchcock, née Whelan, and William Edgar Hitchcock, were both Roman Catholics, with partial roots in Ireland; William was a greengrocer as his father had been. Describing himself as a well-behaved boy—his father called him his \”little lamb without a spot\”—Hitchcock said he had a lifelong fear of policemen. His father sent him to the local police station with a note when he was five; the looked at the cell for a few minutes, saying, ‘This is what do to to naughty boys experience, we’ve got a case here’ and locked him in a cell. He later became a film producer and director, and moved to Hollywood in 1939, and made a string of successful films, including Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Shadow of A Doubt, and Notorious.