Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock grew up over his father's grocery shop in Leytonstone, east London, the youngest of three children of strict Catholic parents. He said that at five his father sent him to the local police station with a note, and that the sergeant locked him in a cell for several minutes to show him what happened to naughty boys — a story he repeated for decades, however exactly it happened. Jesuit priests at his London grammar school added regular corporal punishment, which he later credited with teaching him fear. He trained as a draftsman, then talked his way into the film business in 1919 designing title cards, and worked up through the British industry to his first credited direction, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925.

Hitchcock directed Britain's first talkie, Blackmail, in 1929, then moved to Hollywood in 1939 to make Rebecca for producer David O. Selznick, which won the Best Picture Oscar though Hitchcock lost Best Director. Over the next three decades came Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds — the run of suspense films that defined the genre for American audiences. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which he hosted on television from 1955 to 1965, turned his silhouette and deadpan introductions into a brand as recognizable as the films themselves. He was nominated for the directing Oscar five times and never won, an omission the film industry treated as its own embarrassment. Elizabeth II knighted him in December 1979, four months before he died, closing a career that ran past fifty features across six decades.

His reputation as a genial television host sat uneasily beside his treatment of Tippi Hedren, the actress he cast in The Birds and Marnie. By her own account, repeated in interviews and her 2016 memoir, Hitchcock isolated her on set, had her followed, made unwanted advances, and effectively controlled her contract to limit other work when she rejected him. During the filming of The Birds' attic attack scene he had live birds thrown at her for days, and one clawed her cheek near her eye, halting production. Co-star Diane Baker later corroborated parts of her account. Hitchcock never faced formal consequence in his lifetime, and Hedren herself has said the treatment effectively ended her career as a leading lady even as it produced two performances now studied as some of the era's best.

Hitchcock died at his home in Bel Air on April 29, 1980, four months after his knighthood. The reassessment started almost immediately: Vertigo, a box-office disappointment on release, climbed the critical rankings for decades and displaced Citizen Kane as the British Film Institute's top film in its 2012 critics' poll. Scorsese, Spielberg, and Brian De Palma have all named him directly as the reason they make the films they make. But the record on Hedren has not receded with time — the HBO film The Girl, released in 2012, dramatized her account for a new audience, and critics revisiting his catalogue now routinely weigh the technical mastery against what it plainly cost the women who worked for him.

Alfred Hitchcock's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Blackmail film
  Britain's first sound feature 1929
• Rebecca film
  Best Picture Oscar, his first Hollywood film 1940
• Vertigo film
  Later ranked the greatest film ever made by Sight and Sound 1958
• Psycho film
  The most profitable film of his career 1960
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents television
  Hosted from 1955 to 1965 1955

• August 13, 1899 aged 0 Born in Leytonstone, London
• 1919 aged ~20 Enters the film industry designing title cards
• 1925 aged ~26 Directs his first film, The Pleasure Garden
• December 2, 1926 aged 27 Marries Alma Reville
• 1929 aged ~30 Directs Blackmail, Britain's first sound feature
• 1939 aged ~40 Moves to Hollywood to make Rebecca for David O. Selznick
• 1955 aged ~56 Begins hosting Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television
• 1960 aged ~61 Releases Psycho
• April 29, 1980 aged 80 Dies in Bel Air, California, four months after being knighted

• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. influenced
• Steven Spielberg b. 1946
  Director and producer whose blockbusters and dramas have defined American cinema for five decades. influenced
• Francis Ford Coppola b. 1939
  Director and producer whose landmark films helped define the New Hollywood era and modern American epic filmmaking. influenced
• Edward Hopper 1882–1967
  Realist painter whose depictions of urban isolation, like Nighthawks, became iconic American images. visual influence
• Billy Wilder 1906–2002
  Hollywood writer-director of Sunset Boulevard — Some Like It Hot and Double Indemnity. rival