British-American filmmaker and producer, the most famous suspense, melodrama and thriller director of all time. In a prodigious career the “Master of Suspense” made 54 feature films, starting with the silent genre and is dearly remembered for The 39 Steps (1935), Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964).
His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, although he never won the award for Best Director despite five nominations
The son of a grocer and educated by Jesuits, he moved to Hollywood in 1939 and remained there the rest of his life. He was a shy, private outsider who lived quietly with a wife of 53 years and one daughter. He once confessed that he was “frightened of everything: burglars, policemen, crowd, darkness, Sundays.” Nor was he interested in sex, saying that it is “for kids, for movies – a great bore.”
Hitchcock became a highly visible public figure through interviews, movie trailers, cameo appearances in his own films, and the ten years in which he hosted the television program “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (1955-1965).
In 1978, film critic John Russell Taylor described Hitchcock as “the most universally recognizable person in the world”, and “a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius”.
The master of his media died from kidney failure on 28 April 1980 at age 80 in Hollywood, California.
Link to Wikipedia biography