Background

Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899 in London, United Kingdom, in the family of Williamand Emma Jane (Whelan) Hitchcock. His parents were both Roman Catholics, with partial roots in Ireland. There was a large extended family, including Uncle John Hitchcock with his five-bedroom Victorian house on Campion Road, Putney, complete with maid, cook, chauffeur and gardener. When he was six, the family moved to Limehouse and leased two stores at 130 and 175 Salmon Lane, which they ran as a fish-and-chips shop and fishmongers' respectively; they lived above the former. The family moved again when he was 11, this time to Stepney.

In 1939 he came to the United States, and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955.

Education

Hitchcock was seven when he attended his first school, the Howrah House Convent in Poplar, which he entered in 1907. He also attended a convent school, the Wode Street School "for the daughters of gentlemen and little boys", run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus; briefly attended a primary school near his home; and was for a very short time, when he was nine, a boarder at Salesian College in Battersea.

On 5 October 1910 Hitchcock was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline. His favourite subject was geography, and he became interested in maps, and railway and bus timetables.

On 25 July 1913, he left St Ignatius and enrolled in night classes at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation in Poplar.

Career

During a career that spanned five decades, Hitchcock directed fifty-three feature films. He has been both hailed as a master technician and lambasted for caring too much about technique and not enough about the characters in his film.

Hitchcock at first planned to be an engineer. After leaving school, Hitchcock was employed at Henley Telegraph Company, where he became a technical estimator at the young age of nineteen.

The year was 1920 when Hitchcock read in a trade paper that Paramount was opening a branch studio of Famous Players-Lasky in Islington, London. Seeing an opportunity, he read one of the books that the studio was planning to turn into a movie. This was still the era of silent films, and dialogue and narration was displayed on the screen as titles shown between scenes to help the audience follow the story. These titles were often illustrated with pictures. Hitchcock employed his drawing skills and designed several pictures to serve as title illustrations. Submitting his work to the studio, he was hired as a title designer, and his first job was doing the titles for the 1920 film The Great Day.

Practicing his scriptwriting abilities, Hitchcock wrote an adaptation for the screen based on a serial novel published in a magazine. Upon showing his work to a British company that had taken over the Islington studio, Hitchcock impressed the filmmakers enough to land a job as an assistant director. When another company came to the studio in 1922 to film an adaptation of the play "Woman to Woman", Hitchcock offered to write the screenplay. Not only did he become co-screenwriter, he also worked on that film as assistant director, art director, and editor.

Michael Bacon, the man who formed the company Hitchcock was working for, offered the young assistant his first chance to direct an entire film with "The Pleasure Garden" in 1925. Hitchcock went on to direct ten silent features. "The Lodger", the 1926 film about a man accused of being Jack the Ripper, was a thriller that was a sensation in England. Even more important of these early films was 1929’s "Blackmail", in which the unique Hitchcock style - and his interest in the theme of guilt - first becomes truly discernible. "The Pleasure Garden" and Hitchcock’s second film, "The Mountain Eagle", were shot in German studios.

By the time "Blackmail" was released, Hitchcock was already developing a reputation as a fine director of thrillers. Yet in the 1930s he was still honing his skills, and, consequently, some of his early works were not successful. Hitchcock was not satisfied with the limitations of working in English studios. He had always admired American cinema more than British, and so it did not take much for producer David O. Selznick to lure Hitchcock to Hollywood in 1939. Selznick had expected Hitchcock to make another spy film, but the director surprised him with a psychological thriller instead. "Rebecca" is the story of a young woman who becomes the second wife of the rich widower Mr. de Winter.

"Shadow of a Doubt", released in 1943, is often considered one of Hitchcock’s best works, and it was also one of his personal favorites. More typical of his early films, however, are movies such as "Suspicion" and "Spellbound", in which the hero might be a killer but proves in the end not to be. During the 1940s, Hitchcock was still evolving as a director. Though still not viewed as his most brilliant period, Hitchcock was assuredly coming into his own.

Many of Hitchcock’s most well-known and talked-about films were made from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, including "Rear Window", "Vertigo", "North by Northwest", "Psycho", and "The Birds." "Mamie", released in 1964, readdresses Hitchcock’s interest in psychological disturbances.

Hitchcock did not break any new ground with his last four films. Indeed, some critics felt that his color films suffered from “sloppiness” not seen in his earlier black-and-white movies. "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz" are spy films. "Frenzy" is a thriller, and "Family Plot" is another dark comedy harkening back to "The Trouble with Harry."

Hitchcock concluded his career with "Family Plot", which was second only to "Psycho" in terms of box office sales, earning over seven million dollars. In the latter decades of his life, Hitchcock was known not only for his film directing, but also as the host of the television program "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" and as the editor of the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" horror and thriller short story collections.

Achievements

• Alfred was widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as "the Master of Suspense", he directed 53 feature films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well-known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1955–1965.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories for Late at Night 1961
  • Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery: Eleven Spooky Stories for Young People 1962
  • Tales of Terror: 58 Short Stories Chosen by the Master of Suspense 1986
  • Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful 1961

• movie

  • The Man Who Knew Too Much 1956
  • Sabotage
  • Murder!
  • North By Northwest 1959
  • Rear Window 1954

Views

Quotations: "Civilization has become so screening and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first hand. Therefore, to prevent our becoming sluggish and jellified, we have to experience them artificially, and the screen is the best medium for this."

Personality

Hitchcock had a reputation for not only being meticulous with his camera, but also for his sense of wit he deployed in his shots.

Connections

On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock and Alma Reville married at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington. The couple honeymooned in Paris, Lake Como and St. Moritz, before returning to London to live in a leased flat on the top two floors of 153 Cromwell Road, Kensington. Their daughter and only child, Patricia Alma Hitchcock, was born on 7 July that year.

Father:

William Hitchcock

Mother:

Emma Jane Whelan

Spouse:

Alma Reville

Brother:

William Hitchcock

Brother:

Eileen Hitchcock

Daughter:

Patricia Alma Hitchcock

References

• Hitchcock (Revised Edition)
  1985
• Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
  2004
• Alfred Hitchcock
  2017
• The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures
  1991
• Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
  2003
• Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Icons) eBook: Michael Wood: Books
  2015
• Alfred Hitchcock's Moviemaking Master Class: Learning about Film from the Master of Suspense
  2013