Early life: 1899–1919 Early childhood and education Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 at the flat above his parents' leased
greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in
Leytonstone, which was then part of
Essex (now part of the
London Borough of Waltham Forest). He was the son of greengrocer and poulterer, William Edgar Hitchcock (1862–1914) and Emma Jane (née Whelan; 1863–1942). The household was "characterised by an atmosphere of discipline". He had an older brother named William John (1888–1943) and an older sister named Ellen Kathleen (1892–1979) who used the nickname "Nellie". His parents were both
Roman Catholics with English and Irish ancestry. His father was a greengrocer, as his grandfather had been. There was a large extended family, including uncle John Hitchcock with his five-bedroom Victorian house on Campion Road in
Putney, complete with a maid, cook, chauffeur, and gardener. Every summer, his uncle rented a seaside house for the family in
Cliftonville, Kent. Hitchcock said that he first became class-conscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals. , where Hitchcock was born; commemorative mural at nos. 527–533
(right) Describing himself as a well-behaved boyhis father called him his "little lamb without a spot"Hitchcock said he could not remember ever having had a playmate. One of his favourite stories for interviewers was about his father sending him to the local police station with a note when he was five; the policeman looked at the note and locked him in a cell for a few minutes, saying, "This is what we do to naughty boys." The experience left him with a lifelong phobia of law enforcement, and he told
Tom Snyder in 1973 that he was "scared stiff of anything ... to do with the law" and that he would refuse to even drive a car in case he got a parking ticket. 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-chip shop and fishmongers' respectively; they lived above the former. Hitchcock attended his first school, the Howrah House Convent in
Poplar, which he entered in 1907, at age 7. According to biographer
Patrick McGilligan, he stayed at Howrah House for at most two years. 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. He then attended a primary school near his home and was for a short time a boarder at
Salesian College in
Battersea. The family moved again when Hitchcock was eleven, this time to
Stepney, and on 5 October 1910 he was sent to
St Ignatius College in
Stamford Hill, a
Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline. As corporal punishment, the priests used a flat, hard, springy tool made of
gutta-percha and known as a "ferula" which struck the whole palm; punishment was always at the end of the day, so the boys had to sit through classes anticipating the punishment if they had been written up for it. He later said that this is where he developed his sense of fear. The school register lists his year of birth as 1900 rather than 1899; biographer
Donald Spoto says he was deliberately enrolled as a ten-year-old because he was a year behind with his schooling. While biographer Gene Adair reports that Hitchcock was "an average, or slightly above-average, pupil", Hitchcock said that he was "usually among the four or five at the top of the class"; at the end of his first year, his work in Latin, English, French and
religious education was noted. He told
Peter Bogdanovich: "The Jesuits taught me organisation, control and, to some degree, analysis." Hitchcock's favourite subject was geography and he became interested in maps and the timetables of trains, trams and buses; according to
John Russell Taylor, he could recite all the stops on the
Orient Express. He had a particular interest in
London trams. An overwhelming majority of his films include rail or tram scenes, in particular
The Lady Vanishes,
Strangers on a Train and
Number Seventeen. A
clapperboard shows the number of the scene and the number of takes, and Hitchcock would often take the two numbers on the clapperboard and whisper the London tram route names. For example, if the clapperboard showed "Scene 23; Take 3", he would whisper "
Woodford,
Hampstead"Woodford being the terminus of the route 23 tram, and Hampstead the end of route 3.
Henley's Hitchcock told his parents that he wanted to be an engineer, and 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. In a
book-length interview in 1962, he told
François Truffaut that he had studied "mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation". Then, on 12 December 1914, his father, who had been suffering from
emphysema and kidney disease, died at the age of 52. To support himself and his motherhis older siblings had left home by thenHitchcock took a job, for 15
shillings a week (£ in ), as a technical clerk at the
Henley Telegraph and Cable Company in Blomfield Street, near
London Wall. He continued night classes, this time in art history, painting, economics and political science. His older brother ran the family shops, while he and his mother continued to live in Salmon Lane. Hitchcock was too young to enlist when the
First World War started in July 1914, and when he reached the required age of 18 in 1917, he received a C3 classification ("free from serious organic disease, able to stand service conditions in garrisons at home ... only suitable for sedentary work"). He joined a cadet regiment of the
Royal Engineers and took part in theoretical briefings, weekend drills and exercises. John Russell Taylor wrote that, in one session of practical exercises in
Hyde Park, Hitchcock was required to wear
puttees. He could never master wrapping them around his legs, and they repeatedly fell down around his ankles. After the war, Hitchcock took an interest in creative writing. In June 1919, he became a founding editor and business manager of Henley's in-house publication,
The Henley Telegraph (sixpence a copy), to which he submitted several short stories. Henley's promoted him to the advertising department, where he wrote copy and drew graphics for electric cable advertisements. He enjoyed the job and would stay late at the office to examine the proofs; he told Truffaut that this was his "first step toward cinema". He enjoyed watching films, especially American cinema, and from the age of 16 read the trade papers; he watched
Charlie Chaplin,
D. W. Griffith and
Buster Keaton, and particularly liked
Fritz Lang's
Der müde Tod (released in Britain in 1921 as
Destiny).
Inter-war career: 1919–1939 Famous Players–Lasky '' in London While still at Henley's, he read in a trade paper that
Famous Players–Lasky, the production arm of
Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London. They were planning to film
The Sorrows of Satan by
Marie Corelli, so he produced some drawings for the
title cards and sent his work to the studio. They hired him, and in 1919 he began working for
Islington Studios in Poole Street,
Hoxton, as a title-card designer. Donald Spoto wrote that most of the staff were Americans with strict job specifications, but the English workers were encouraged to try their hand at anything, which meant that Hitchcock gained experience as a co-writer, art director and production manager on at least 18 silent films.
The Times wrote in February 1922 about the studio's "special art title department under the supervision of Mr. A. J. Hitchcock". His work included
Number 13 (1922), also known as
Mrs. Peabody; it was cancelled because of financial problems - the few finished scenes are
lostand
Always Tell Your Wife (1923), which he and
Seymour Hicks finished together when Hicks was about to give up on it. Hicks wrote later about being helped by "a fat youth who was in charge of the property room ... [n]one other than Alfred Hitchcock".
Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany , Poole Street,
Hoxton, north London When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant director by a new firm run in the same location by
Michael Balcon, later known as
Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock worked on
Woman to Woman (1923) with the director
Graham Cutts, designing the set, writing the script and producing. He said: "It was the first film that I had really got my hands onto." The editor and "script girl" on
Woman to Woman was
Alma Reville, his future wife. He also worked as an assistant to Cutts on
The White Shadow (1924),
The Passionate Adventure (1924),
The Blackguard (1925) and ''
The Prude's Fall (1925). The Blackguard'' was produced at the
Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam, where Hitchcock watched part of the making of
F. W. Murnau's
The Last Laugh (1924). He was impressed with Murnau's work, and later used many of his techniques for the set design in his own productions. In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct
The Pleasure Garden (1926), starring
Virginia Valli, a co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm
Emelka at the
Geiselgasteig studio near Munich. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiancée, was assistant director-editor. Although the film was a commercial flop, Balcon liked Hitchcock's work; a
Daily Express headline called him the "Young man with a master mind". On an early sign of his high profile, the
British Film Institute (BFI) would write, "In an unusual display of confidence for a first time director, Hitchcock included his own signature in the titles." In March 1926, the British film magazine
Picturegoer ran an article entitled "Alfred the Great" by the film critic
Cedric Belfrage, who praised Hitchcock for possessing "such a complete grasp of all the different branches of film technique that he is able to take far more control of his production than the average director of four times his experience." Production of
The Pleasure Garden encountered obstacles which Hitchcock would later learn from: on arrival to
Brenner Pass, he failed to declare his
film stock to customs and it was confiscated; one actress could not enter the water for a scene because she was on her
period; budget overruns meant that he had to borrow money from the actors. Hitchcock also needed a translator to give instructions to the cast and crew. In Germany, Hitchcock observed the nuances of
German cinema and filmmaking which had a big influence on him. When he was not working, he would visit Berlin's art galleries, concerts and museums. He would also meet with actors, writers and producers to build connections. Balcon asked him to direct a second film in Munich,
The Mountain Eagle (1926), based on an original story titled ''Fear o' God
. The film is lost, and Hitchcock called it "a very bad movie". A year later, Hitchcock wrote and directed The Ring; although the screenplay was credited solely to his name, Elliot Stannard assisted him with the writing. The Ring
garnered positive reviews; the Bioscope'' critic called it "the most magnificent British film ever made". When he returned to England, Hitchcock was one of the early members of the London Film Society, newly formed in 1925. Through the Society, he became fascinated by the work by Soviet filmmakers:
Dziga Vertov,
Lev Kuleshov,
Sergei Eisenstein and
Vsevolod Pudovkin. He would also socialise with fellow English filmmakers
Ivor Montagu,
Adrian Brunel and
Walter Mycroft. Hitchcock recognised the value in cultivating his own brand, with the director aggressively promoting himself during this period. In a 1925 London Film Society meeting he declared directors were what mattered most in making films, with
Donald Spoto writing that Hitchcock proclaimed, "
We make a film succeed. The name of the director should be associated in the public's mind with a quality product. Actors come and go, but the name of the director should stay clearly in the mind of the audience." Hitchcock established himself as a name director with his first thriller,
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). Upon its release, the trade journal
Bioscope wrote: "It is possible that this film is the finest British production ever made". Hitchcock told Truffaut that the film was the first of his to be influenced by
German Expressionism: "In truth, you might almost say that
The Lodger was my first picture." In a strategy for self-publicity,
The Lodger saw him make his first
cameo appearance in a film, where he sat in a newsroom. Continuing to market his brand following the success of
The Lodger, Hitchcock wrote a letter to the
London Evening News in November 1927 about his filmmaking, participated in studio-produced publicity, and by December 1927 he developed the original sketch of his widely recognised profile which he introduced by sending it to friends and colleagues as a Christmas present.
Marriage , 2 December 1926 On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock married the English screenwriter
Alma Reville 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. Reville, who was born just hours after Hitchcock, converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, apparently at the insistence of Hitchcock's mother; she was baptised on 31 May 1927 and confirmed at
Westminster Cathedral by Cardinal
Francis Bourne on 5 June. In 1928, when they learned that Reville was pregnant, the Hitchcocks purchased "Winter's Grace", a
Tudor farmhouse set in eleven acres on Stroud Lane,
Shamley Green, Surrey, for £2,500. Their daughter and only child,
Patricia (Pat) Alma Hitchcock, was born on 7 July that year. Pat died on 9 August 2021 at the age of 93. Reville became her husband's closest collaborator;
Charles Champlin wrote in 1982: "The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's." When Hitchcock accepted the
AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, he said that he wanted to mention "four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter, Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville." Reville wrote or co-wrote on many of Hitchcock's films, including
Shadow of a Doubt,
Suspicion and
The 39 Steps.
Early sound films Hitchcock began work on his tenth film,
Blackmail (1929), when its production company,
British International Pictures (BIP), converted its
Elstree studios to
sound. The film was the first British "
talkie"; this followed the rapid development of sound films in the United States, from the use of brief sound segments in
The Jazz Singer (1927) to the first full sound feature
Lights of New York (1928).
Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, which includes an early example of a
red telephone box being used for criminal activity, while the climax takes place on the dome of the
British Museum. During this period, Hitchcock directed segments for a BIP
revue,
Elstree Calling (1930), and directed a short film,
An Elastic Affair (1930), featuring two
Film Weekly scholarship winners.
An Elastic Affair is one of the lost films. (the archetypal
"Hitchcock blonde") and
Robert Donat in
The 39 Steps (1935) In 1933, Hitchcock signed a multi-film contract with
Gaumont-British, once again working for Michael Balcon. His first film for the company,
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success; his second,
The 39 Steps (1935), was acclaimed in the UK, and gained him recognition in the US. The latter starred the quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde",
Madeleine Carroll, who was the template for his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. Screenwriter
Robert Towne remarked: "It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with
The 39 Steps".
John Buchan, author of
The Thirty-Nine Steps on which the film is loosely based, met with Hitchcock on set, and attended the high-profile premiere at the
New Gallery Cinema in London. Upon viewing the film, the author said it had improved on the book. The MacGuffin is an item or goal the protagonist is pursuing, one that otherwise has no narrative value; in
The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of design plans. Hitchcock released two spy thrillers in 1936.
Sabotage was loosely based on
Joseph Conrad's novel,
The Secret Agent (1907), about a woman who discovers that her husband is a terrorist, and
Secret Agent, based on two stories in
Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) by
W. Somerset Maugham. In his positive review of
Sabotage for
The Spectator, the writer and journalist
Graham Greene identified the children's matinée scene as an "ingenious and pathetic twist
stamped as Mr Hitchcock's own".
Secret Agent starred Madeleine Carroll and
John Gielgud, with
Peter Lorre playing Gielgud's deranged assistant, and typical Hitchcockian themes include
mistaken identity, trains and a "Hitchcock blonde". At this time, Hitchcock also became notorious for pranks against the cast and crew. These jokes ranged from simple and innocent to crazy and maniacal. For instance, he hosted a dinner party where he dyed all the food blue because he claimed there weren't enough blue foods. He also had a horse delivered to the dressing room of his friend, actor
Gerald du Maurier. Hitchcock's next film,
Young and Innocent (1937), was a crime thriller based on the 1936 novel
A Shilling for Candles by
Josephine Tey. Starring
Nova Pilbeam and
Derrick De Marney, the film was relatively enjoyable for the cast and crew to make. To meet distribution purposes in America, the film's runtime was cut and this included removal of one of Hitchcock's favourite scenes: a children's tea party which becomes menacing to the protagonists. (middle) and
Michael Redgrave (right) in a publicity shot for
The Lady Vanishes (1938) Hitchcock's next major success was
The Lady Vanishes (1938), "one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era", according to
Philip French, in which Miss Froy (
May Whitty), a British spy posing as a governess, disappears on a train journey through the
fictional European country of Bandrika. The film saw Hitchcock receive the
1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director. Benjamin Crisler of
The New York Times wrote in June 1938: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not:
Magna Carta, the
Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world." The film was based on the novel
The Wheel Spins (1936) written by
Ethel Lina White, and starred
Michael Redgrave (in his film debut) and
Margaret Lockwood. By 1938, Hitchcock was aware that he had reached his peak in Britain. He had received numerous offers from producers in the United States, but he turned them all down because he disliked the contractual obligations or thought the projects were repellent. However, producer
David O. Selznick offered him a concrete proposal to make a film based on the sinking of , which was eventually shelved, but Selznick persuaded Hitchcock to come to
Hollywood. In June 1938, Hitchcock sailed to New York aboard the
RMS Queen Mary, and found that he was already a celebrity; he was featured in magazines and gave interviews to radio stations. In Hollywood, Hitchcock met Selznick for the first time. Selznick offered him a four-film contract, approximately $40,000 for each picture (). Before finalising any American deal, Hitchcock had one last film to make in England, as director of the
Charles Laughton-produced picture
Jamaica Inn (1939), which he had signed on to make in May 1938, right before his first trip to the US. The Hitchcocks lived in a spacious flat on
Wilshire Boulevard, and slowly acclimatised themselves to the Los Angeles area. He and his wife Alma kept a low profile, and were not interested in attending parties or being celebrities. Hitchcock discovered his taste for fine food in West Hollywood, but still carried on his way of life from England. He was impressed with Hollywood's filmmaking culture, expansive budgets and efficiency, compared to the limits that he had often faced in Britain. In June that year,
Life called him the "greatest master of melodrama in screen history". Although Hitchcock and Selznick respected each other, their working arrangements were sometimes difficult. Selznick suffered from constant financial problems, and Hitchcock was often unhappy about Selznick's creative control and interference over his films. Selznick was also displeased with Hitchcock's method of shooting just what was in the script, and nothing more, which meant that the film could not be cut and remade differently at a later time. As well as complaining about Hitchcock's "goddamn jigsaw cutting", their personalities were mismatched: Hitchcock was reserved whereas Selznick was flamboyant. Eventually, Selznick generously lent Hitchcock to the larger film studios. Selznick made only a few films each year, as did fellow independent producer
Samuel Goldwyn, so he did not always have projects for Hitchcock to direct. Goldwyn had also negotiated with Hitchcock on a possible contract, only to be outbid by Selznick. In a later interview, Hitchcock said: "[Selznick] was the Big Producer. ... Producer was king. The most flattering thing Mr. Selznick ever said about me—and it shows you the amount of control—he said I was the 'only director' he'd 'trust with a film'." Hitchcock approached American cinema cautiously; his first American film was set in England in which the "Americanness" of the characters was incidental:
Rebecca (1940) was set in a Hollywood version of England's Cornwall and based on a
novel by English novelist
Daphne du Maurier. Selznick insisted on a faithful adaptation of the book, and disagreed with Hitchcock with the use of humour. The film, starring
Laurence Olivier and
Joan Fontaine, concerns an unnamed naïve young woman who marries a widowed aristocrat. She lives in his large
English country house, and struggles with the lingering reputation of his elegant and worldly first wife Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances. The film won
Best Picture at the
13th Academy Awards; the statuette was given to producer Selznick. Hitchcock received his first nomination for
Best Director, his first of five such nominations. Hitchcock's second American film was the thriller
Foreign Correspondent (1940), set in Europe, based on
Vincent Sheean's book
Personal History (1935) and produced by
Walter Wanger. It was nominated for Best Picture that year. Hitchcock felt uneasy living and working in Hollywood while Britain was at war; his concern resulted in a film that overtly supported the British war effort. Filmed in 1939, it was inspired by the rapidly changing events in Europe, as covered by an American newspaper reporter played by
Joel McCrea. By mixing footage of European scenes with scenes filmed on a Hollywood
backlot, the film avoided direct references to
Nazism,
Nazi Germany and Germans, to comply with the
Motion Picture Production Code at the time.
Early war years In September 1940, the Hitchcocks bought the Cornwall Ranch near
Scotts Valley, California, in the
Santa Cruz Mountains. Their primary residence was an English-style home in
Bel Air, purchased in 1942.
Saboteur (1942) is the first of two films that Hitchcock made for
Universal Studios during the decade. Hitchcock wanted
Gary Cooper and
Barbara Stanwyck or
Henry Fonda and
Gene Tierney to star, but was forced by Universal to use Universal contract player
Robert Cummings and
Priscilla Lane, a freelancer who signed a one-picture deal with the studio, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas. The story depicts a confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a real saboteur (
Norman Lloyd) atop the
Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock took a three-day tour of New York City to scout for
Saboteurs filming locations. He also directed
Have You Heard? (1942), a photographic dramatisation for
Life magazine of the
dangers of rumours during wartime. In 1943, he wrote a mystery story for
Look, "The Murder of
Monty Woolley", a sequence of captioned photographs inviting the reader to find clues to the murderer's identity; Hitchcock cast the performers as themselves, such as Woolley, Doris Merrick and make-up man Guy Pearce.
(1943) trailer with Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright|alt=Shadow of a Doubt'' trailer depicting
Joseph Cotten and
Teresa Wright Back in England, Hitchcock's mother Emma was severely ill; she died on 26 September 1942 at age 79. Hitchcock never spoke publicly about his mother, but his assistant said that he admired her. Four months later, on 4 January 1943, his brother William died of an overdose at age 52. Hitchcock was not very close to William, but his death made Hitchcock conscious about his own eating and drinking habits. He was overweight and suffering from back aches. His New Year's resolution in 1943 was to take his diet seriously with the help of a physician. In January that year,
Shadow of a Doubt was released, which Hitchcock had fond memories of making. In the film, Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (
Teresa Wright) suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (
Joseph Cotten) of being a serial killer. Hitchcock filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern California city of
Santa Rosa. He told Truffaut in 1962: Hitchcock's typical dinner before his weight loss had been a roast chicken, boiled ham, potatoes, bread, vegetables, relishes, salad, dessert, a bottle of wine and some brandy. To lose weight, his diet consisted of black coffee for breakfast and lunch, and steak and salad for dinner, but it was hard to maintain; Donald Spoto wrote that his weight fluctuated considerably over the next 40 years. At the end of 1943, despite the weight loss, the Occidental Insurance Company of Los Angeles refused his application for life insurance.
Wartime non-fiction films Hitchcock returned to the UK for an extended visit in late 1943 and early 1944. While there he made two short
propaganda films,
Bon Voyage (1944) and
Aventure Malgache (1944), for the
Ministry of Information. In June and July 1945, Hitchcock served as "treatment advisor" on a
Holocaust documentary that used
Allied Forces footage of the liberation of
Nazi concentration camps. The film was assembled in London and produced by
Sidney Bernstein of the Ministry of Information, who brought Hitchcock (a friend of his) on board. It was originally intended to be broadcast to the Germans, but the British government deemed it too traumatic to be shown to a shocked post-war population. Instead, it was transferred in 1952 from the
British War Office film vaults to London's
Imperial War Museum and remained unreleased until 1985, when an edited version was broadcast as an episode of
PBS Frontline, under the title the Imperial War Museum had given it:
Memory of the Camps. The full-length version of the film,
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was restored in 2014 by scholars at the Imperial War Museum.
Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953 Later Selznick films and
Ingrid Bergman in
Spellbound (1945) Hitchcock worked for David Selznick again when he directed
Spellbound (1945), which explores
psychoanalysis and features a
dream sequence designed by
Salvador Dalí. The dream sequence as it appears in the film is ten minutes shorter than was originally envisioned; Selznick edited it to make it "play" more effectively.
Gregory Peck plays amnesiac Dr. Anthony Edwardes under the treatment of analyst Dr. Peterson (
Ingrid Bergman), who falls in love with him while trying to unlock his repressed past. Two
point-of-view shots were achieved by building a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took) and out-sized 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 film. The original musical score by
Miklós Rózsa makes use of the
theremin, and some of it was later adapted by the composer into Rozsa's Piano Concerto Op. 31 (1967) for piano and orchestra. The spy film
Notorious followed next in 1946. Hitchcock told François Truffaut that Selznick sold him, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and
Ben Hecht's screenplay, to
RKO Radio Pictures as a "package" for $500,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) because of cost overruns on Selznick's
Duel in the Sun (1946).
Notorious stars Bergman and Grant, both Hitchcock collaborators, and features a plot about Nazis,
uranium and South America. His prescient use of uranium as a plot device led to him being briefly placed under surveillance by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Patrick McGilligan, in or around March 1945, Hitchcock and Hecht consulted
Robert Millikan of the
California Institute of Technology about the development of a uranium bomb. Selznick complained that the notion was "science fiction", only to be confronted by the news of the detonation of two atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945.
Transatlantic Pictures (1948) with James Stewart turning his back to the fixed camera|alt=A typical scene from Rope'' showing
James Stewart Hitchcock formed an independent production company,
Transatlantic Pictures, with his friend
Sidney Bernstein. He made two films with Transatlantic, one of which was his first colour film. With
Rope (1948), Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with
Lifeboat. The film appears as a very limited number of continuous shots, but it was actually shot in 10 ranging from to 10 minutes each; a 10-minute length of film was the most that a camera's film magazine could hold at the time. Some 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. The film features
James Stewart in the leading role, and was the first of four films that Stewart made with Hitchcock. It was inspired by the
Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Critical response at the time was mixed.
Under Capricorn (1949), set in 19th-century Australia, also uses the short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used
Technicolor in this production, then returned to
black-and-white for several years. Transatlantic Pictures became inactive after the last two films. Hitchcock filmed
Stage Fright (1950) at
Elstree Studios in England, where he had worked during his British International Pictures contract many years before. He paired one of
Warner Bros.' most popular stars,
Jane Wyman, with the expatriate German actor
Marlene Dietrich and used several prominent British actors, including
Michael Wilding,
Richard Todd and
Alastair Sim. This was Hitchcock's first proper production for Warner Bros., which had distributed
Rope and
Under Capricorn, because Transatlantic Pictures was experiencing financial difficulties. His thriller
Strangers on a Train (1951) was based on the
novel of the same name by
Patricia Highsmith. Hitchcock combined many elements from his preceding films. He approached
Dashiell Hammett to write the dialogue, but
Raymond Chandler took over, then left over disagreements with the director. In the film, two men casually meet, one of whom speculates on a foolproof method to murder; he suggests that two people, each wishing to do away with someone, should each perform the other's murder.
Farley Granger's role was as the innocent victim of the scheme, while
Robert Walker, previously known for "boy-next-door" roles, played the villain.
I Confess (1953) was set in
Quebec with
Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest.
Peak years: 1954–1964 Dial M for Murder and Rear Window and
Grace Kelly in
Rear Window (1954)
I Confess was followed by three colour films starring
Grace Kelly:
Dial M for Murder (1954),
Rear Window (1954) and
To Catch a Thief (1955). In
Dial M for Murder,
Ray Milland plays the villain who tries to murder his unfaithful wife (Kelly) for her money. She kills the hired assassin in self-defence, so Milland manipulates the evidence to make it look like murder. Her lover, Mark Halliday (
Robert Cummings), and Police Inspector Hubbard (
John Williams) save her from execution. Hitchcock experimented with
3D cinematography for
Dial M for Murder. Hitchcock moved to
Paramount Pictures and filmed
Rear Window (1954), starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, as well as
Thelma Ritter and
Raymond Burr. Stewart's character is a photographer named Jeff (based on
Robert Capa) who must temporarily use a wheelchair. Out of boredom, he begins observing his neighbours across the courtyard, then becomes convinced that one of them (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife. Jeff eventually manages to convince his policeman buddy (
Wendell Corey) and his girlfriend (Kelly). As with
Lifeboat and
Rope, the principal characters are depicted in confined or cramped quarters, in this case Stewart's studio apartment. Hitchcock uses close-ups of Stewart's face to show his character's reactions, "from the comic voyeurism directed at his neighbours to his helpless terror watching Kelly and Burr in the villain's apartment".
Alfred Hitchcock Presents , son-in-law, and granddaughters, c. 1955–1956 From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series
Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With his droll delivery, gallows humour, and distinctive features, the series made Hitchcock a celebrity. The title-sequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile (he drew it himself; it is composed of only nine strokes), which his real silhouette then filled. The series theme tune was
Funeral March of a Marionette by the French composer
Charles Gounod (1818–1893). His introductions always included some sort of wry humour, such as the description of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one
electric chair, while two are shown with a sign "Two chairs—no waiting!" He directed 18 episodes of the series, which aired from 1955 to 1965. It became
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, and NBC broadcast the final episode on 10 May 1965. In the 1980s, a
new version of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions in a
colourised form. In the same year, his third Grace Kelly film,
To Catch a Thief, was released; it is set in the
French Riviera, and stars Kelly and Cary Grant. Grant plays retired thief John Robie, who becomes the prime suspect for a spate of robberies in the Riviera. A thrill-seeking American heiress played by Kelly surmises his true identity and tries to seduce him. "Despite the obvious age disparity between Grant and Kelly and a lightweight plot, the witty script (loaded with double entendres) and the good-natured acting proved a commercial success." It was Hitchcock's last film with Kelly; she married
Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, and ended her film career afterward. Hitchcock then remade his own
1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956. This time, the film starred James Stewart and
Doris Day, who sang the theme song "
Que Sera, Sera", which won the
Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a big hit. They play a couple whose son is kidnapped to prevent them from interfering with an assassination. As in the 1934 film, the climax takes place at the
Royal Albert Hall.
The Wrong Man (1956), Hitchcock's final film for Warner Bros., is a low-key black-and-white production based on a real-life case of
mistaken identity reported in
Life magazine in 1953. This was the only film of Hitchcock to star
Henry Fonda, playing a
Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief, who is arrested and tried for robbery while his wife (
Vera Miles) emotionally collapses under the strain. Hitchcock told Truffaut that his lifelong fear of the police attracted him to the subject and was embedded in many scenes. by the
Golden Gate Bridge in
Vertigo (1958) While directing episodes for
Alfred Hitchcock Presents during the summer of 1957, Hitchcock was admitted to hospital for
hernia and
gallstones, and had to have his
gallbladder removed. Following a successful surgery, he immediately returned to work to prepare for his next project.
Vertigo (1958) again starred James Stewart, with
Kim Novak and
Barbara Bel Geddes. He had wanted
Vera Miles to play the lead, but she was pregnant. He told
Oriana Fallaci: "I was offering her a big part, the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated blonde, a real actress. We'd have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the bad taste to get pregnant. I hate pregnant women, because then they have children." In
Vertigo, Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from
acrophobia, who becomes obsessed with a woman he has been hired to shadow (Novak). Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock did not opt for a happy ending. Some critics, including Donald Spoto and
Roger Ebert, agree that
Vertigo is the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the
Pygmalion-like obsessions of a man who moulds a woman into the person he desires.
Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death, than any other work in his filmography.
Vertigo contains a camera technique developed by Irmin Roberts, commonly referred to as a
dolly zoom, which has been copied by many filmmakers. The film premiered at the
San Sebastián International Film Festival, and Hitchcock won the Silver Seashell prize.
Vertigo is considered a classic, but it attracted mixed reviews and poor box-office receipts at the time; the critic from
Variety opined that the film was "too slow and too long".
Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times thought it was "devilishly far-fetched", but praised the cast performances and Hitchcock's direction. The picture was also the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. In the 2002
Sight & Sound polls, it ranked just behind
Citizen Kane (1941); ten years later, in the same magazine, critics chose it as the best film ever made.
Time magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining".
Psycho (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film. Based on
Robert Bloch's 1959 novel
Psycho, which was inspired by the case of
Ed Gein, the film was produced on a tight budget of $800,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from
Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, and the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the hallmarks of a new horror-film genre. The film proved popular with audiences, with lines stretching outside theatres as viewers waited for the next showing. It broke box-office records in the United Kingdom, France, South America, the United States and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period.
Psycho was the most profitable of Hitchcock's career, and he personally earned in excess of $15 million (equivalent to $ million in ). He subsequently swapped his rights to
Psycho and his TV anthology for 150,000 shares of
MCA, making him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at least, although that did not stop studio interference. Following the first film,
Psycho became an American horror
franchise:
Psycho II,
Psycho III,
Bates Motel,
Psycho IV: The Beginning and a colour
1998 remake of the original.
Truffaut interview On 13 August 1962, Hitchcock's 63rd birthday, the French director
François Truffaut began a 50-hour interview of Hitchcock, filmed over eight days at Universal Studios, during which Hitchcock agreed to answer 500 questions. It took four years to transcribe the tapes and organise the images; it was published as a book in 1967, which Truffaut nicknamed the "Hitchbook". The audio tapes were used as the basis of a documentary in 2015. Truffaut sought the interview because it was clear to him that Hitchcock was not simply the mass-market entertainer the American media made him out to be. It was obvious from his films, Truffaut wrote, that Hitchcock had "given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues". He compared the interview to "Oedipus' consultation of the oracle".
The Birds '' (1963), in which Hitchcock discusses humanity's treatment of "our feathered friends" The film scholar Peter William Evans wrote that
The Birds (1963) and
Marnie (1964) are regarded as "undisputed masterpieces". Hitchcock had intended to film
Marnie first, and in March 1962 it was announced that Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco since 1956, would come out of retirement to star in it. When Kelly asked Hitchcock to postpone
Marnie until 1963 or 1964, he recruited
Evan Hunter, author of
The Blackboard Jungle (1954), to develop a screenplay based on a
Daphne du Maurier short story, "
The Birds" (1952), which Hitchcock had republished in his
My Favorites in Suspense (1959). He hired
Tippi Hedren to play the lead role. It was her first role; she had been a model in New York when Hitchcock saw her, in October 1961, in an NBC television advert for
Sego, a diet drink: "I signed her because she is a classic beauty. Movies don't have them any more. Grace Kelly was the last." He insisted, without explanation, that her first name be written in single quotation marks: 'Tippi'. In
The Birds, Melanie Daniels, a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (
Rod Taylor) in a bird shop;
Jessica Tandy plays his possessive mother. Hedren visits him in
Bodega Bay (where
The Birds was filmed)
Diane Baker, her co-star in
Marnie, said: "[N]othing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was." While filming the attack scene in the atticwhich took a week to filmshe was placed in a caged room while two men wearing
elbow-length protective gloves threw live birds at her. Toward the end of the week, to stop the birds' flying away from her too soon, one leg of each bird was attached by nylon thread to elastic bands sewn inside her clothes. She broke down after a bird cut her lower eyelid, and filming was halted on doctor's orders.
Marnie '' (1964) In June 1962, Grace Kelly announced that she had decided against appearing in
Marnie (1964). Hedren had signed an exclusive seven-year, $500-a-week contract with Hitchcock in October 1961, and he decided to cast her in the lead role opposite
Sean Connery. In 2016, describing Hedren's performance as "one of the greatest in the history of cinema",
Richard Brody called the film a "story of sexual violence" inflicted on the character played by Hedren: "The film is, to put it simply, sick, and it's so because Hitchcock was sick. He suffered all his life from furious sexual desire, suffered from the lack of its gratification, suffered from the inability to transform fantasy into reality, and then went ahead and did so virtually, by way of his art." A 1964
New York Times review called it Hitchcock's "most disappointing film in years", citing Hedren's and Connery's lack of experience, an amateurish script and "glaringly fake cardboard backdrops". In the film, Marnie Edgar (Hedren) steals $40,000 from her employer and goes on the run. She applies for a job at Mark Rutland's (Connery) company in Philadelphia and steals from there too. Earlier, she is shown having a panic attack during a thunderstorm and fearing the colour red. Mark tracks her down and blackmails her into marrying him. She explains that she does not want to be touched, but during the "honeymoon", Mark rapes her. Marnie and Mark discover that Marnie's mother had been a prostitute when Marnie was a child, and that, while the mother was fighting with a client during a thunderstormthe mother believed the client had tried to molest MarnieMarnie had killed the client to save her mother. When she remembers what happened, she decides to stay with Mark. Hitchcock told cinematographer
Robert Burks that the camera had to be placed as close as possible to Hedren when he filmed her face.
Evan Hunter, the screenwriter of
The Birds who was writing
Marnie too, explained to Hitchcock that, if Mark loved Marnie, he would comfort her, not rape her. Hitchcock reportedly replied: "Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!" When Hunter submitted two versions of the script, one without the rape scene, Hitchcock replaced him with
Jay Presson Allen.
Later years: 1966–1980 Final films Failing health reduced Hitchcock's output during the last two decades of his life. Biographer
Stephen Rebello claimed Universal imposed two films on him,
Torn Curtain (1966) and
Topaz (1969), the latter of which is based on a
Leon Uris novel, partly set in Cuba. Both were spy thrillers with
Cold War-related themes.
Torn Curtain, with
Paul Newman and
Julie Andrews, precipitated the bitter end of the twelve-year collaboration between Hitchcock and composer
Bernard Herrmann. Hitchcock was unhappy with Herrmann's score and replaced him with
John Addison,
Jay Livingston and
Ray Evans. Upon release,
Torn Curtain was a box office disappointment, and
Topaz was disliked by both critics and the studio. during a press junket for
Family Plot (1976) Hitchcock returned to Britain to make his penultimate film,
Frenzy (1972), based on the novel
Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (1966). After two espionage films, the plot marked a return to the murder-thriller genre. Richard Blaney (
Jon Finch), a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, becomes the prime suspect in the investigation into the "Necktie Murders", which are actually committed by his friend Bob Rusk (
Barry Foster). This time, Hitchcock makes the victim and villain kindreds, rather than opposites, as in
Strangers on a Train. In
Frenzy, Hitchcock allowed nudity for the first time. Two scenes show naked women, one of whom is being raped and strangled; Donald Spoto called the latter "one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of film". Both actors,
Barbara Leigh-Hunt and
Anna Massey, refused to do the scenes, so models were used instead. Biographers have noted that Hitchcock had always pushed the limits of film censorship, often managing to fool
Joseph Breen, the head of the
Motion Picture Production Code. Hitchcock would add subtle hints of improprieties forbidden by censorship until the mid-1960s. Yet, Patrick McGilligan wrote that Breen and others often realised that Hitchcock was inserting such material and were actually amused, as well as alarmed by Hitchcock's "inescapable inferences".
Family Plot (1976) was Hitchcock's last film. It relates 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. While
Family Plot was based on the
Victor Canning novel
The Rainbird Pattern (1972), the novel's tone is more sinister. Screenwriter
Ernest Lehman originally wrote the film, under the working title
Deception, with a dark tone but was pushed to a lighter, more comical tone by Hitchcock where it took the name
Deceit, then finally,
Family Plot.
Knighthood and death Toward the end of his life, Hitchcock was working on the script for a spy thriller,
The Short Night, collaborating with
James Costigan,
Ernest Lehman and
David Freeman. Despite preliminary work, it was never filmed. Hitchcock's health was declining and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a
stroke. The screenplay was eventually published in Freeman's book
The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock (1999). Having refused a
CBE in 1962, Hitchcock was appointed a
Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the
1980 New Year Honours. He was too ill to travel to London—he had a
pacemaker and was being given
cortisone injections for his arthritis—so on 3 January 1980 the British consul general presented him with the papers at Universal Studios. Asked by a reporter after the ceremony why it had taken the Queen so long, Hitchcock quipped, "I suppose it was a matter of carelessness." Cary Grant, Janet Leigh and others attended a luncheon afterwards. His last public appearance was on 16 March 1980, when he introduced the next year's winner of the American Film Institute award.
Donald Spoto, one of Hitchcock's biographers, wrote that Hitchcock had declined to see a priest, but according to Jesuit priest Mark Henninger, he and another priest, Tom Sullivan, celebrated Mass at the filmmaker's home, and Sullivan heard his
confession. Hitchcock was survived by his wife and daughter. His funeral was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills on 30 April, after which his body was
cremated. His remains were scattered over the
Pacific Ocean on 10 May. ==Filmmaking==