Biography

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Name: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
Born: August 13, 1899 - London, England
Dead: April 29, 1980 - Los Angeles, California, USA
Parents: William and Emma Hitchcock

The father was a greengrocer in London's East End. The family was rigorously Catholic, the method of upbringing was exercised with discipline.
The parents was keeping him on a tight leash. The father was rigorous in an almost brutal manner. The mother was loving and considerate but wanted to exercise complete control of his life - every evening he had to stand by her bed and recount for what he had done the entire day.

A childhood memory he told on numerous occations dates back to the age of 5 to 6 years. He had done something wrong, as a punishment the father sent him to the Chief of Police carying a letter; when he had read the letter, little Alfred was put in a dark prison cell for a few minutes - when he was being released, the Chief of Police said: "This is what we do to naughty little boys!"
The schooling took place in a Catholic Monastery School, run by the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits used a brutal and sophisticated kind of physical punishment. The sophisticated part was that the boys being punished could choose for themselves when the punishment should be executed (before midnight) - this made most of the boys postpone the punishment as long as possible, which enabled the fear to build up during the day. This gave Hitch the first insight into the mechanism behind suspense.

When Hitch was 15 years old his father died. He began to participate in classes in history of art and sketching at London University. He also began reading the more serious and technical movie magazines.
At the age of 20 he began sketching captions for the English division of Famous Players-Lasky. This launched the development that eventually made him a director: he became a scriptwriter, architect, director's assistant and cutter - he was actually a real handyman gaining knowledge about all the facets of filmmaking (after becoming a director he also tried working with stage lighting and cinematography).
In 1925 he and the scriptgirl completed "The Blackguard" for Graham Cutts in Germany - he had worked with the scriptgirl for years, her name was Alma Reville. On the way home he proposed, back in England they were engaged. The same year he made his début as a director, by making "The Pleasure Garden".
In 1927 Hitch and Alma was married. One year later Alma gave birth to their first and only child, the daughter Patricia.

On March 1, 1939 the family moved to USA. They didn't live in Hollywood, though, but in Scott Valley a few miles outside of Los Angeles. For his whole life Hitch remained to be the conservative british gentleman, famous for his composure. He was also famous (and notorious) for his special (black and macabre) sense of humour and his practical jokes. He is among other things famous for saying this line to his dinner partner at a distinguished dinner: "I don't use my cock!" - after a short rhetorical pause he continued: "-what I mean is: you can call me Hitch".
When he died he was working on completing the script for a movie, he knew would never be produced, a movie entitled "The Short Night". Alma died two years later.