Alfred Hitchcock: A short biography...

Alfred Joseph Hitchcok was born on 13th August 1899 in London, the son of a poultry dealer and fruit importer. The family was Catholic, and Alfred visited a Jesuit school, London´s St. Ignatius College. He later attended the School of Engeneering and Navigation, where he studied mechanics, electricity, acoustics and navigation. Much of this proved to be helpful in later years. He was working for the advertising department of a telegraph company, when in 1920 he read that Famous Players-Lasky, one of the leading American film production companies in those days, wanted to establish a branch in London, he applied for a job, and was hired to design title cards for their silent movies. As he said later, you could change the whole meaning of a picture by the use of title cards. If the actors were bad, you could turn a drama into a comedy and make the movie a success, anyway.

Within a few years, he became a scenario-writer and assistant director. Famous Players-Lasky turned out to be a financial flop, and the studios were taken over by a British company formed by Michael Balcon (1896-1977). Hitchcock was promoted to occasional directing jobs, but his Number Thirteen wasn´t completed. In 1925, he was sent to Germany, where he made his first two movies as a director, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle. He was assisted by Alma Reville (1899-82 left), whom he married on the 2nd Dec. 1926. His wife worked with him for the next 50 years; their daughter Patricia was born on the 7th July 1928. Pat (lower left with her father in the late 1930s) also appeared in three of her father´s movies.

In 1926, he also directed the first movie that he later called "typical" Hitchcock, The Lodger - A Story of the London Fog. Despite a promising start, his next movies were rather disapppointing from today´s views, his career seemed to be going nowhere, and he even directed parts of a British musical, Elstree Calling (1930)! Then Michael Balcon gave him another chance in 1934 to direct The Man Who Knew Too Much. A few more films followed that are regarded as classics today, until Hitchcock was invited by Hollywood producer David O. Selznick (1902-65) to work for him. In 1939, Hitchcock left England, something Balcon never forgave him.

The fourties brought some more classics, even though Hitchcock had to establish himself in Hollywood again. A "thriller" was regarded as a minor genre, and he had problems to get the stars he wanted. Some stars like Gary Cooper had to admit later that it was a mistake to decline Hitchcock´s offer (Cooper was his first choice for Foreign Correspondent).

During the second world war, Hitchcock, who was too old and physically unable to become a soldier, tried to do his part by directing two films for the British Ministry of Information, Bon Voyage and Adventure Malagache (both 1944). 

Beginning with Rebecca, and without exception since Notorious, Hitchcock also produced his movies. During the preparation to the filmings, he always made story-boards on which the whole movie was drawn, so that there were no surprises during the filmings itself. He said that he wasn´t interested in the movie anymore once he had completed the story-board and could leave the director´s job to someone else, but I doubt that the result would have been the same.

In 1955, he started to work for television as well, and acted as producer for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, together with Norman Lloyd, who had been one of his heavies in Saboteur. Until 1962, he directed some of the over 350 episodes and always introduced the story. In these openings, Hitchcock displayed his typical black humour, which was his trademark for his complete work.  It was followed by the Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65), and remakes of some stories, along with new ones, were made in the 1980s and 1990s, still introduced by coloured clips of Hitchcock´s openings of decades ago. On the left, you can see his famous drawing that became another trademark. He even added this drawing to his signature sometimes when he replied to autograph-seekers.

After his success with the large-scale cinemascope thrillers of the 1950s, he found another challenge by directing a low-budget movie (the filming costed $800.000), that became a tremendous hit at the box-office, Psycho. It´s stars suffered much longer than the filming took: Anthony Perkins was typecast after that as a nervous "psycho", Janet Leigh never took a shower again without locking the bath-room.

In the late 1960s, it seemed that Hitchcock´s career would come to an end. His two movies in those years, Torn Curtain and Topaz, weren´t successfull with the public and critics, his style seemed to have become slow and out-dated. After he had overcome health-problems, however (he had a heart-operation and received a pace-maker), his batteries were at full charge again, and with the rather nasty Frenzy and the more conventional Family Plot, he found a dignified end to his career.

Since 1977, he had been preparing and begun working on The Short Night, but the filming was stopped after Hitchcock´s health condition got worse. He received the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute in 1979 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in early 1980, but he has never won an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

On 29th April 1980, he died at his home in Bel Air, California.

I apologize for this very short biography. There are so many stories and anecdotes around Hitchcock, who always loved to stage himself and was looking careful after his image, but it would be too much to tell even a part of it. I encourage the inclined visitor to my site to search for books (or, if you like, websites) on Hitchcock, there are way too many to even list the best here.

If you´d ask me, however, I´d recommend French director Francois Truffaut´s book Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock (1966, of interviews he lead with Hitchcock, and translated to English and German, among other). You can learn a lot about the man and director from this book, even though, as always, it was in fact Hitchcock who "directed" the interviews and just let out what he wanted to.