Hitchcock made a number of 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.

[10] 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).

[14] 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.

[21] 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.

[32] To support himself and his mother — his older siblings had left home by then — Hitchcock took a job, for 15 shillings a week (£91 in 2023),[33] as a technical clerk at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company in Blomfield Street, near London Wall.

[36] 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").

[48] 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.

[58] In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct The Pleasure Garden (1925), starring Virginia Valli, a co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka at the Geiselgasteig studio near Munich.

"[62] 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.

[82][83] 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.

[88] 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.

[4] 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.

[103] 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.

[e] 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".

[109] 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.

[112] 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.

[5][134] 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.

[153]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.

[175] Hitchcock moved to Paramount Pictures and filmed Rear Window (1954), starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, as well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr.

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".

[184] 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.

[197] Based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein,[198] the film was produced on a tight budget of $800,000 (equivalent to $8.5 million in 2024) and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

"[219] 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".

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).

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.

"[251] In a 1963 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Hitchcock was asked how in spite of appearing to be a pleasant, innocuous man, he seemed to enjoy making films involving suspense and terrifying crime.

[280][verification needed] Krohn's work also sheds light on Hitchcock's practice of generally shooting in chronological order, which he notes sent many films over budget and over schedule and, more importantly, differed from the standard operating procedure of Hollywood in the Studio System Era.

[285] David Gritten, the newspaper's film critic, wrote: "Unquestionably the greatest filmmaker to emerge from these islands, Hitchcock did more than any director to shape modern cinema, which would be utterly different without him.

[299][300] The David O. Selznick and the Ernest Lehman collections housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, contain material related to Hitchcock's work on the production of The Paradine Case, Rebecca, Spellbound, North by Northwest and Family Plot.