Alfred Hitchcock

He was the son of Emma Jane (née Whelan; 1863–1942) and William Edgar Hitchcock (1862–1914), and 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 partial 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.

Hitchcock said that he first became class-conscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals.

Describing himself as a well-behaved boy — his 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."

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director.

He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema.

In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, many of which are still widely watched and studied today.

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, which was then part of Essex (now on the outskirts of East London).

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 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.

Hitchcock initially trained as a technical clerk and copywriter before entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer.

His directorial debut was the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden (1925).

His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), helped to shape the thriller genre, and Blackmail (1929) was the first British "talkie".

His thrillers The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century.

By 1939, he had international recognition and producer David O. Selznick persuaded him to move to Hollywood.

A string of successful films followed, including Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Notorious (1946).

Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Hitchcock nominated as Best Director.

, nine of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

He also received Oscar nominations for Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960).

Hitchcock's other notable films include Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), all of which were also financially successful and are highly regarded by film historians.

Hitchcock made multiple films with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including four with Cary Grant, four with James Stewart, three with Ingrid Bergman and three consecutively with Grace Kelly.

Known as the "Master of Suspense", he became as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65).

His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, although he never won the award for Best Director, despite five nominations.

Hitchcock became an American citizen in 1955.

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.

He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, and was knighted in December of that year, four months before his death on 29 April 1980.

In 2012, Hitchcock's psychological thriller Vertigo, starring Stewart, displaced Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based on its world-wide poll of hundreds of film critics.