Film director. Born August 13, 1899, in London, England. The son of William Hitchcock, a grocer, and his wife Emma, Hitchcock studied engineering at St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in London, and later took art courses at the University of London. In 1920, after briefly working as a technician at a cable company and in the advertising department of a department store, he was hired as a draftsman for a London film studio. Hitchcock moved quickly up the ranks from scriptwriter to art director to assistant director. He directed his first film, a low-budget melodrama called The Pleasure Garden, in 1925.
Hitchcock first gained a reputation as an up-and-coming director in 1927, when he released his first hit, The Lodger, a film about the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper. In 1929, he directed Blackmail, Britain’s first widely successful non-silent film. During the 1930s, Hitchcock was the leading director in Britain and had garnered international acclaim for his spy thrillers, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). In 1939, the prominent producer David O. Selznick (flush from the tremendous success of Gone With the Wind) convinced Hitchcock to move to Hollywood, by then the home of the most advanced filmmaking technology in the world. Hitchcock’s move to America (he later became a U.S. citizen) marked the crucial turning point in his career. His first American film was an adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier’s classic gothic romance Rebecca (1940), starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. The film was a critical and popular success, winning an Academy Award for Best Picture. In the years following his American debut, Hitchcock continued to draw mass audiences to such suspenseful melodramas as Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Rope (1948), and Strangers on a Train (1951). The consistent commercial success of such films led many critics to undercut Hitchcock’s skill as a director, often claiming that his films lacked substance and relied on slick yet superficial tricks of the camera to grab audiences’ attention. Even his most acclaimed works—Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960)—would be most appreciated during his lifetime not by American critics but by a group of up-and-coming French filmmakers dubbed the New Wave.