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Alfred Hitchcock

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Producers, directors and
media figures

   CAPTION: Alfred Hitchcock

   Hitchcock in 1956.
      Born:    August 13, 1899
               Leytonstone, London, England
      Died:    April 29, 1980
               Bel Air, Los Angeles, USA
   Occupation: Film director and producer
     Spouse:   Alma Reville

   Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE ( August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980)
   was a highly influential British director and producer who pioneered
   many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. He directed more
   than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades, from the
   silent film era, through the invention of talkies, to the colour era.
   Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly
   recognizable directors in the world during his lifetime, and remains
   one of the best known and most popular directors of all time, famous
   for his expert and largely unrivaled control of pace and suspense
   throughout his movies. Entertainment Weekly went so far as to give him
   the title of the greatest film director ever.

   Hitchcock was born and raised in London, England. While he began his
   directing career in London, he worked primarily in the United States
   beginning in 1939 and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1956. Hitchcock
   and his family lived in a mountaintop estate high above Scotts Valley,
   California, from 1940 to 1972. He died of renal failure in 1980.

   Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known
   for their droll humour. They often portray innocent people caught up in
   circumstances beyond their control or understanding. This often
   involves a transference of guilt in which the "innocent" character's
   failings are transferred to another character, and magnified. Another
   common theme is the basic incompatibility of men and women; Hitchcock's
   films often take a cynical view of traditional romance.

   Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best
   Picture, although four others were nominated. Hitchcock never won the
   Academy Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg
   Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967, but never personally
   received an Academy Award of Merit.

   Until the later part of his career, Hitchcock was far more popular with
   film audiences than with film critics, especially the elite British and
   American critics. In the late 1950s the French New Wave critics,
   especially Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, were
   among the first to see and promote his films as artistic works.
   Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom they applied their
   auteur theory, which stresses the artistic authority of the director in
   the film-making process.

   Hitchcock's innovations and vision have influenced a great number of
   filmmakers, producers, and actors. His influence helped start a trend
   for film directors to control artistic aspects of their movies without
   answering to the movie's producer.

Life

Early life

   Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, Essex
   (now London), the second son and youngest of the three children of
   William Hitchcock, a greengrocer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock
   (née Whelan). His family was mostly Roman Catholic. Hitchcock was sent
   to Catholic boarding schools in London. He often described his
   childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, which was undoubtedly
   compounded by his weight issues.

   Hitchcock claimed that on one occasion early in his life, after he had
   acted childishly, his father sent him to the local police station
   carrying a note. When he presented the police officer on duty with the
   note, he was locked in a cell for a few moments, long enough to be
   petrified. This was a favorite anecdote of his, and the incident is
   often cited in connection with the theme of distrust of police which
   runs through many of his films. His mother would often make him address
   her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved
   badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. This would be recalled by
   the character Norman Bates in Psycho.

   At 14, Hitchcock lost his father and left the Jesuit-run St Ignatius'
   College in Stamford Hill, his school at the time, to study at the
   School for Engineering and Navigation. After graduating, he became a
   draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.

   About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started
   working in film in London. In 1920, he obtained a full-time job at
   Islington Studios under its American owners, Famous Players-Lasky, and
   their British successors, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles
   for silent movies.

Pre-war British career

   In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to
   direct his first film, The Pleasure Garden made at Ufa studios in
   Germany. The commercial failure of this film and the one that followed
   it, The Mountain Eagle, threatened to derail his promising career. In
   1926, however, Hitchcock made his debut in the thriller genre. The
   resulting film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was a major
   commercial and critical success. Like many of his earlier works, it was
   influenced by Expressionist techniques he had witnessed firsthand in
   Germany. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating
   such themes as the "wrong man".

   Following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock began his first efforts
   to promote himself in the media, and hired a publicist to cement his
   growing reputation as one of the British film industry's rising stars.
   In 1926, he was to marry his assistant director Alma Reville. Their
   daughter Patricia was born in 1928. Alma was Hitchcock's closest
   collaborator. She wrote some of his screenplays and (though often
   uncredited) worked with him on every one of his films.

   In 1929, he began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was
   in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first
   sound pictures. With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of
   the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using
   famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences.

   In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at
   Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. His first film for the company,
   The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success and his second, The 39
   Steps (1935), is often considered one of the best films from his early
   period. It was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the "
   MacGuffin", a plot device around which a whole story would revolve. In
   The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of blueprints.

   His next major success was in 1938, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and
   fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman ( Dame
   May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional
   country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany).

   By the end of the 1930s, Hitchcock was at the top of his game
   artistically, and in a position to name his own terms when David O.
   Selznick managed to entice the Hitchcocks to Hollywood.

Hollywood

   Hitchcock's gallows humour and the suspense that became his trademark
   continued in his American work. However, working arrangements with his
   new producer were less than optimal. Selznick suffered from perennial
   money problems and Hitchcock was often unhappy with the amount of
   creative control demanded by Selznick over his films. Consequently,
   Selznick ended up "loaning" Hitchcock to the larger studios more often
   than producing Hitchcock's films himself.

   With the prestigious Selznick picture Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made
   his first American movie, although it was set in England and based on a
   novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. This Gothic melodrama
   explores the fears of a naïve young bride who enters a great English
   country home and must grapple with the problems of a distant husband, a
   predatory housekeeper, and the legacy of her husband's late wife, the
   beautiful, mysterious Rebecca. The film has also subsequently been
   noted for the lesbian undercurrents in Judith Anderson's performance.
   It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. However, the
   statuette went to Selznick as the film's producer, and the film did not
   win the Best Director award. There were additional problems between
   Selznick and Hitchcock; Selznick, as he usually did, imposed very
   restrictive rules upon Hitchcock, hindering his creative control.
   Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film as Selznick wanted, immediately
   creating friction within their relationship. At the same time, Selznick
   complained about Hitchcock's "goddam jigsaw cutting," which meant that
   the producer did not have nearly the leeway to create his own film as
   he liked, but had to follow Hitchcock's vision of the finished product.

   Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign
   Correspondent, was also nominated for Best Picture that year.

   Hitchcock's work during the 1940s was diverse, ranging from the
   romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and the courtroom drama The
   Paradine Case (1947) to the dark and disturbing Shadow of a Doubt
   (1943).

   Saboteur (1942) was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for
   Universal, a studio where he would work in his later years. Dealing
   with the threat of sabotage, without labeling the actual nation for
   whom the saboteurs worked (probably Nazi Germany), Hitchcock was forced
   to utilize Universal contract players Robert Cummings and Priscilla
   Lane, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas, and made
   the most of the situation. Breaking with Hollywood tradition, Hitchcock
   did extensive location filming, especially in New York City, and
   memorably depicted a confrontation between a suspected saboteur
   (Cummings) and a real saboteur ( Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of
   Liberty.

   Shadow of a Doubt, his personal favourite and the second of the
   Universal films, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton ( Teresa
   Wright) who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Spencer ( Joseph Cotten)
   of murder. In its use of overlapping characters, dialogue, and closeups
   it has provided a generation of film theorists with psychoanalytic
   potential, including Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. The film also
   harkens to one of Cotten's better known films, Citizen Kane. Hitchcock
   again filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern
   California town of Santa Rosa.

   Spellbound explored the then fashionable subject of psychoanalysis and
   featured a dream sequence which was designed by Salvador Dalí. The
   actual dream sequence in the film was considerably cut from the
   original scene planned to run for some minutes, but proved too
   disturbing for the finished film.

   Notorious (1946) marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as
   director. As Selznick failed to see the subject's potential, he allowed
   Hitchcock to make the film for RKO. From this point on, Hitchcock would
   produce his own films, giving him a far greater degree of freedom to
   pursue the projects that interested him. Starring Hitchcock regulars
   Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and featuring a plot about Nazis,
   uranium, and South America, Notorious was a huge box office success and
   has remained one of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films. Its inventive use
   of suspense and props briefly led to Hitchcock's being under
   surveillance by the CIA due to his use of uranium as a plot device.

   Hitchcock's first colour film, Rope appeared in 1948. Here Hitchcock
   experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he
   had done earlier with Lifeboat. He also experimented with exceptionally
   long takes — up to ten minutes (see Themes and devices). Featuring
   James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of an eventual
   four films Stewart would make for Hitchcock. Based on the Leopold and
   Loeb case of the 1920s, Rope is also among several films with
   homosexual subtext to emerge from the Hays Office–controlled Hollywood
   studio era.

   Under Capricorn (1949), set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used
   this short-lived technique, but to a more limited extent. He again used
   Technicolor in this production, then returned to black and white films
   for several years. For these two films Hitchcock formed a production
   company with Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which
   folded after these two unsuccessful pictures.

Peak years and decline

   With Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia
   Highsmith, Hitchcock combined many of the best elements from his
   preceding British and American films. Two men casually meet and
   speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of
   the men, though, takes this banter entirely seriously. With Farley
   Granger reprising some elements of his role from Rope, Strangers
   continued the director's interest in the narrative possibilities of
   homosexual blackmail and murder. This was Hitchcock's first production
   for Warner Brothers, which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn.

   MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose client list included James Stewart, Janet
   Leigh, and other actors who would appear in Hitchcock's films, had a
   significent impact in packaging and marketing Hitchcock's films
   beginning in the 1950s. With Wasserman's help, Hitchcock received
   tremendous creative freedom from the studios, as well as substantive
   financial rewards as a result of Paramount's profit-sharing contract.

   Three very popular films starring Grace Kelly followed. Dial M for
   Murder (1954) was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick
   Knott. This was originally another experimental film, with Hitchcock
   using the technique of 3D cinematography, although the film was not
   released in this format at first; it did receive screenings in the
   early 1980s in 3D form. The film also marked a return to Technicolor
   productions for Hitchcock. Rear Window starred James Stewart again, as
   well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Here, the wheelchair-bound
   Stewart observes the movements of his neighbours across the courtyard
   and becomes convinced one of them has murdered his wife. Like Lifeboat
   and Rope, the movie was photographed almost entirely within the
   confines of a small space: Stewart's tiny studio apartment overlooking
   the massive courtyard set. To Catch a Thief, set in the French Riviera,
   starred Kelly and Cary Grant.

   1956 saw the release of two films by Hitchcock: The Wrong Man, based on
   a real-life case of mistaken identity, his only film to star Henry
   Fonda, and a remake of his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much,
   this time with James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song, "
   Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Qué Será, Será)" (which became a big hit for
   Day).

   1958's Vertigo again starred Stewart, this time with Kim Novak and
   Barbara Bel Geddes. The film was a commercial failure, but has come to
   be viewed by many as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces.

   Hitchcock followed Vertigo with three more successful pictures. All are
   also recognised as among his very best films: North by Northwest
   (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The latter two were
   particularly notable for their unconventional soundtracks, both by
   Bernard Herrmann: the screeching strings in the murder scene in Psycho
   pushed the limits of the time, and The Birds dispensed completely with
   conventional instruments, using an electronically produced soundtrack.
   These were his last great films, after which his career slowly wound
   down (although some critics such as Robin Wood and Donald Spoto contend
   Marnie, from 1964, is first-class Hitchcock). In 1972, Hitchcock
   returned to London to film Frenzy, his last major success. For the
   first time, Hitchcock allowed nudity and profane language, which had
   before been taboo, in one of his films.

   Failing health slowed down his output over the last two decades of his
   life.

   Family Plot (1976) was his last film. It related the escapades of
   "Madam" Blanche Tyler played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent
   spiritualist, and her taxi driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from
   her phony powers. William Devane, Karen Black and Katherine Helmond
   co-starred.

   Near the end of his life, Hitchcock worked on the script for a project
   spy thriller, The Short Night, which was never filmed. The script was
   published in book form after Hitchcock's death.

   Hitchcock was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British
   Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1980 New Years Honours. He died
   just four months later, on April 29, before he had the opportunity to
   be formally invested by the Queen. Despite the brief period between his
   knighthood and death, he was nevertheless entitled to be known as Sir
   Alfred Hitchcock and to use the postnominal letters "KBE", because he
   remained a British subject when he adopted American citizenship in
   1956.

   Alfred Hitchcock died from renal failure in his Bel-Air, Los Angeles
   home, aged 80, and was survived by his wife Alma Reville, and their
   daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. A funeral service was held at
   Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. His body was cremated
   and the ashes scattered.

Themes and devices

   Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over surprise in his films. In
   surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In
   suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the
   characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension
   around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth.

   Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the
   guilty, occasionally making this indictment inescapably clear to
   viewers one and all, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable"
   audience. In Rear Window ( 1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by James
   Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the
   film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by
   saying, "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been
   addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald
   turns to face the camera directly for the first time — at this point,
   audiences often gasp.

   One of Hitchcock's favourite devices for driving the plots of his
   stories and creating suspense was what he called the " MacGuffin." The
   Oxford English Dictionary, however, credits Hitchcock's friend, the
   Scottish screenwriter Angus McPhail, as being the true inventor of the
   term. Hitchcock defined this term in an interview to François Truffaut,
   in 1966. Hitchcock would use this plot device extensively. Many of his
   suspense films revolve around this device: a detail which, by inciting
   curiosity and desire, drives the plot and motivates the actions of
   characters within the story, but whose specific identity and nature is
   unimportant to the spectator of the film. In Vertigo, for instance,
   "Carlotta Valdes" is a MacGuffin; she never appears and the details of
   her death are unimportant to the viewer, but the story about her
   ghost's haunting of Madeleine Elster is the spur for Scottie's
   investigation of her, and hence the film's entire plot. In Notorious
   the uranium that the main characters must recover before it reaches
   Nazi hands serves as a similarly arbitrary motivation: any dangerous
   object would suffice. And state secrets of various kinds serve as
   MacGuffins in several of the spy films, especially his earlier British
   films The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes.
   In Psycho, an obvious MacGuffin at the beginning of the film (a package
   containing $40,000 in stolen money) is actually a red herring.

   Most of Hitchcock's films contain cameo appearances by Hitchcock
   himself: the director would be seen for a brief moment boarding a bus,
   crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the
   courtyard, or appearing in a photograph. This playful gesture became
   one of Hitchcock's signatures. As a recurring theme he would carry a
   musical instrument — especially memorable was the large double bass
   case that he wrestles onto the train at the beginning of Strangers on a
   Train.

   In his earliest appearances he would fill in as an obscure extra,
   standing in a crowd or walking through a scene in a long camera shot.
   But he became more prominent in his later appearances, as when he turns
   to see Jane Wyman's disguise when she passes him on the street in Stage
   Fright, and in stark silhouette in his final film Family Plot. (See a
   list of Hitchcock cameo appearances.)

   Hitchcock includes the consumption of brandy in nearly every sound
   film. "I'll get you some brandy. Drink this down. Just like medicine
   ..." says James Stewart's character to Kim Novak, in Vertigo. In a
   real-life incident, Hitchcock dared Montgomery Clift at a dinner party
   around the filming of I Confess (1953) to swallow a carafe of brandy,
   which caused the actor to pass out almost immediately. This near
   obsession with brandy remains unexplained. In Torn Curtain and Topaz,
   brandy is replaced by cognac.

   Another almost inexplicable feature of any Hitchcock film is the
   inclusion of a staircase. Of course, stairways inspire many suspenseful
   moments, most notably the final sequence in Notorious and the
   detective's demise in the Bates' mansion in Psycho. However, a
   completely nonfunctional staircase adorns the apartment of the James
   Stewart character in Rear Window, as if Hitchcock feels compelled to
   its inclusion by some unspoken superstition. This, too, could be
   Hitchcock under the influence of German Expressionism, the films of
   which often featured heavily stylized and menacing staircases (cf. The
   Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). In fact, early director Leopold Jessner is
   often credited with creating the first dramatic, filmic staircases in
   his 1921 film Hintertreppe.

   Hitchcock seemed to delight in the technical challenges of filmmaking.
   In Lifeboat, Hitchcock sets the entire action of the movie in a small
   boat, yet manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous
   repetition. His trademark cameo appearance was a dilemma, given the
   claustrophobic setting; so Hitchcock appeared on camera in a fictitious
   newspaper ad for a weight loss product.

   In Spellbound two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved by
   constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the
   character whose point of view the camera took) and outsized props for
   it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For
   added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-coloured red
   on some copies of the black-and-white print of the film.

   Rope (1948) was another technical challenge: a film that appears to
   have been shot entirely in a single take. The film was actually shot in
   eight takes of approximately 10 minutes each, which was the amount of
   film that would fit in a single camera reel; the transitions between
   reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a
   moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next
   take with the camera in the same place.

   His 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera trick that has been imitated
   and re-used so many times by filmmakers, it has become known as the
   Hitchcock zoom.

   Although famous for inventive camera angles, Hitchcock generally
   avoided points of view that were physically impossible from a human
   perspective. For example, he would never place the camera looking out
   from inside a refrigerator. This helps to draw audience members into
   the film's action. (A notable exception is the pacing of the mysterious
   lodger being viewed through the floor from beneath in The Lodger
   (1927), giving the audience a visual to what the family is imagining in
   response to the sound of footsteps - which otherwise wouldn't come
   across as strongly in a silent film.)

   Regarding Hitchcock's sometimes less than pleasant relationship with
   actors, there was a persistent rumor that he had said that actors were
   cattle. Hitchcock later denied this, typically tongue-in-cheek,
   clarifying that he had only said that actors should be treated like
   cattle. Carole Lombard, tweaking Hitchcock and drumming up a little
   publicity, brought some cows along with her when she reported to the
   set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. For Hitchcock, the actors, like the props,
   were part of the film's setting.

   Hitchcock often dealt with matters that he felt were sexually perverse
   or kinky, and many of his films aimed to subvert the restrictive
   Hollywood Production Code that prohibited any mention of homosexuality.

   A recurring theme in Hitchcock's movies is mistaken identity. Audiences
   see this theme in almost all of Hitchcock's movies. A prime example can
   be found in North By Northwest, when Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is
   mistaken for George Kaplan, a non-existent government agent made up by
   the FBI.

   In many of Hitchcock's movies, an ordinary person is thrust into an
   extraordinary situation. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Dr. Ben
   McKenna is an ordinary man from Indianapolis who is on a vacation in
   Morocco and he winds up with his son getting kidnapped. This entangling
   of an ordinary protagonist in peril and guilt is also evident in
   Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The
   Wrong Man, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and others.

   Hitchcock loved the number 7. He often placed numbers that added up to
   7 in his movies.

   Another reoccuring theme in Hitchcock's films is that of the bumbling
   authorities. In almost every single film, the police have little to no
   impact, often mistaking important clues or letting the villain go. This
   reportedly stems from an incident when Hitchcock was a young man, when
   as part of a tour to a police station he was locked in a cell briefly.

His character and its effects on his films

   Hitchcock's films sometimes feature male characters struggling in their
   relationships with their mothers. In North by Northwest (1959), Roger
   Thornhill ( Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his
   mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him (in this
   case, they are). In The Birds (1963), the Rod Taylor character, an
   innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and
   struggles to free himself of a clinging mother ( Jessica Tandy). The
   killer in Frenzy (1972) has a loathing of women but idolizes his
   mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but
   has an incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion
   Lorne). Sebastian ( Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly
   conflictual relationship with his mother, who is (correctly) suspicious
   of his new bride Alicia Huberman ( Ingrid Bergman). And, of course,
   Norman Bates' troubles with his mother in Psycho are infamous.

   Hitchcock heroines tend to be lovely, cool blondes who seem proper at
   first but, when aroused by passion or danger, respond in a more
   sensual, animal, or even criminal way. As noted, the famous victims in
   The Lodger are all blondes. In The 39 Steps, Hitchcock's glamorous
   blonde star, Madeleine Carroll, is put in handcuffs. In Marnie (1964),
   glamorous blonde Tippi Hedren is a kleptomaniac. In To Catch a Thief
   (1955), glamorous blonde Grace Kelly offers to help someone she
   believes is a cat burglar. In Rear Window, Lisa risks her life by
   breaking into Lars Thorwald's apartment. And, most notoriously, in
   Psycho, Janet Leigh's character steals $40,000 and gets murdered by a
   reclusive lunatic. Hitchcock's last blonde heroine was - years after
   Dany Robin and her "daughter" Claude Jade in Topaz - Barbara Harris as
   a phony psychic turned amateur sleuth in his final film, 1976's Family
   Plot. It is interesting to note that in the same film, the diamond
   smuggler played by Karen Black could also fit that role, as she wears a
   long blonde wig in various scenes and is becoming increasingly
   uncomfortable about her line of work.

   Hitchcock saw that reliance on actors and actresses was a holdover from
   the theatre tradition. He was a pioneer in using camera movement,
   camera set ups and montage to explore the outer reaches of cinematic
   art.

   Most critics and Hitchcock scholars, including Donald Spoto and Roger
   Ebert, agree that Vertigo represents the director's most personal and
   revealing film, dealing with the obsessions of a man who crafts a woman
   into the woman he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater
   length his interest in the relation between sex and death than any
   other film in his filmography.

   Hitchcock often said that his personal favourite was Shadow of a Doubt.

His style of working

   Hitchcock once commented, "The writer and I plan out the entire script
   down to the smallest detail, and when we're finished all that's left to
   do is to shoot the film. Actually, it's only when one enters the studio
   that one enters the area of compromise. Really, the novelist has the
   best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the
   rest."

   Hitchcock would storyboard each movie down to the finest detail. He was
   reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder,
   since he didn't need to do so, though in publicity photos he was shown
   doing so. He also used this as an excuse to never have to change his
   films from his initial vision. If a studio asked him to change a film,
   he would claim that it was already shot in a single way, and that there
   were no alternate takes to consider. However respected film critic Bill
   Krohn in his book Hitchcock At Work has questioned the popular notion
   of Hitchcock's reliance on storyboards. In his book, Krohn after
   researching script revisions of Hitchcock's most popular works,
   concludes that Hitchcock's reliance on storyboards has been
   over-exaggerated and argues that Hitchcock only storyboarded a few
   sequences and not each and every scene as most think. He however admits
   that this myth was largely perpetuated by Hitchcock himself.

   Similarly much of Hitchcock's hatred of actors has been exaggerated.
   Hitchcock simply did not tolerate the method approach as he believed
   that actors should only concentrate on their performances and leave
   work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. In a
   Sight and Sound interview, he stated that, ' the method actor is OK in
   the theatre because he has a free space to move about. But when it
   comes to cutting the face and what he sees and so forth, there must be
   some discipline' (see ). During the making of Lifeboat, Walter Slezak,
   who played the German character, stated that Hitchcock knew the
   mechanics of acting better than anyone he knew. Several critics have
   observed that despite his reputation as a man who disliked actors,
   several actors who worked with him gave fine, often brilliant
   performances and these performances contribute to the film's success.

   The first book devoted to the director is simply named Hitchcock. It is
   a document of a one-week interview by François Truffaut in 1967. ( ISBN
   0-671-60429-5)

Awards

   The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Hitchcock the
   Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, in 1967. However, despite six
   earlier nominations, he never won an Oscar in a contested category. His
   Oscar nominations were:
     * for Best Director: Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound
       (1945), Rear Window (1954), and Psycho (1960); and

   as a producer, for Best Picture: Suspicion (1941).

   Rebecca, which Hitchcock directed, won the 1940 Best Picture Oscar for
   its producer David O. Selznick. In addition to Rebecca and Suspicion,
   two other films Hitchcock directed, Foreign Correspondent and
   Spellbound, were nominated for Best Picture.

   Hitchcock was knighted in 1980.

Television and books

   Along with Walt Disney, Hitchcock was one of the first persons to fully
   envision just how popular the medium of television would become. From
   1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host and producer of a long-running
   television series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents. While his films
   had made Hitchcock's name strongly associated with suspense, the TV
   series made Hitchcock a celebrity himself. His irony-tinged voice,
   image, and mannerisms became instantly recognizable and were often the
   subject of parody. He directed a few episodes of the TV series himself
   and he upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on
   using his TV production crew to produce his motion picture Psycho. In
   the late 1980s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced
   for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions.

   Alfred Hitchcock is also immortalised in print and appeared as himself
   in the very popular juvenile detective series, Alfred Hitchcock and the
   Three Investigators. The long-running detective series was clever and
   well written, with characters much younger than the Hardy Boys. In
   ghost-written introductions, "Alfred Hitchcock" formally introduced
   each case at the beginning of the book, often giving them new cases to
   solve. At the end of each book, Alfred Hitchcock would discuss the
   specifics of the case with Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews and Peter
   Crenshaw and every so often the three boys would give Alfred Hitchcock
   mementos of their case.

   When Alfred Hitchcock died, his chores as the boys' mentor/friend would
   be done by a fictional character: a retired detective named Hector
   Sebastian. Due to the popularity of the series, Alfred Hitchcock and
   the Three Investigators scored several reprints and out of respect, the
   latter reprints were changed to just The Three Investigators. Over the
   years, more than one name has been used to replace Alfred Hitchcock's
   character, especially for the earlier books when his role was
   emphasised.

   At the height of Hitchcock's success, he was also asked to introduce a
   set of books with his name attached. The series was a collection of
   short stories by popular short story writers, primarily focused on
   suspense and thrillers. These titles included Alfred Hitchcock's
   Monster Museum, Alfred Hithcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and
   Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense, Alfred
   Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery, Alfred
   Hitchcock Presents Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, and Alfred
   Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful. Hitchcock himself was not actually
   involved in the reading, reviewing, editing or selection of the short
   stories; in fact, even his introductions were ghost-written. The entire
   extent of his involvement with the project was to lend his name and
   collect a check.

   Some notable writers whose works were used in the collection include
   Shirley Jackson (Strangers in Town, The Lottery), T.H. White ( The Once
   and Future King), Robert Bloch, H. G. Wells ( The War of the Worlds),
   Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and the
   creator of The Three Investigators, Robert Arthur.

Filmography

Phobias

Fear of Eggs (Ovophobia)

   Alfred Hitchcock had an extreme fear of eggs (also known as ovophobia),
   he said: I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me.
   That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything
   more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow
   liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve
   never tasted it. Fear of eggs

Fear of the police

   Hitchcock also had a serious fear of the police, which reportedly was
   the reason he never learned to drive. His reasoning was that if one
   never drove, then one would never have an opportunity to be pulled over
   by the police and issued a ticket.

Frequent collaborators

     * Sara Allgood
     * Saul Bass
     * Charles Bennett
     * Ingrid Bergman
     * Robert Burks
     * Madeleine Carroll
     * Leo G. Carroll
     * Joseph Cotten
     * Hume Cronyn
     * Robert Cummings
     * Joan Fontaine
     * John Forsythe
     * Farley Granger
     * Cary Grant
     * Ben Hecht
     * Tippi Hedren
     * Bernard Herrmann
     * Malcolm Keen
     * Grace Kelly
     * Charles Laughton
     * Peter Lorre
     * Vera Miles
     * Ivor Novello
     * Anny Ondra
     * Gregory Peck
     * Jessie Royce Landis
     * James Stewart
     * John Williams
     * Edith Head
     * Albert Whitlock

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