Alfred Hitchcock

Born: August 13 1899
Where: Leytonestone, London, UK
Died: April 29 1980

The acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who deftly blended sex, suspense and humor.

He began his filmmaking career in 1919 illustrating title cards for silent films at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio in London.

There he learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant director in 1922 when he directed an unfinished film, No. 13 or Mrs. Peabody.

His first completed film as director was the Anglo-German The Pleasure Garden but his breakthrough was 1926's prototypical crime thriller The Lodger.

An early example of Hitchcock's technical virtuosity was his creation of "subjective sound" for Blackmail, his first sound film in which a woman stabs an artist to death when he tries to seduce her.

The Man Who Knew Too Much, a commercial and critical success, established a favourite pattern: an investigation of family relationships within a suspenseful story.

The 39 Steps showcased a mature Hitchcock; it is a stylish and efficiently told chase film brimming with exciting incidents and memorable characters.

Despite their merits, both The Secret Agent and Sabotage (both 1936) exhibited flaws Hitchcock later acknowledged and learned from.

The Lady Vanishes displayed no such shortcomings and was a sleek, exemplary Hitchcock: fast-paced, witty, and magnificently entertaining.

Hitchcock's last British film Jamaica Inn and his first Hollywood effort Rebecca were both handsomely mounted though somewhat uncharacteristic works based on novels by Daphne du Maurier.

Shadow of a Doubt - about a young woman who discovers her favourite uncle is a murderer - was Hitchcock's early Hollywood masterwork.

Hitchcock would return to the feminine sacrifice-of-identity theme several times, most immediately with the masterful Notorious in 1946).

Other psychological dramas of the late 1940s were Spellbound, The Paradine Case and 1949's Under Capricorn.

During his most inspired period, from 1950 to 1960, Hitchcock produced a cycle of memorable films which included minor works such as I Confess, and the sophisticated thrillers Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief.

He also directed several top-drawer films like Strangers on a Train and the troubling early docudrama The Wrong Man, a searing critique of the American justice system.

His three unalloyed masterpieces of the period were investigations into the very nature of watching cinema.

Rear Window made viewers voyeurs, then had them pay for their pleasure. Vertigo took the lost-feminine identity film to fashion as haunting a movie as Hollywood has ever produced.

North by Northwest is perhaps Hitchcock's most fully realized film with all the trademarks present and correct: ingenious shots, subtle male-female relationships, dramatic score, bright Technicolor, inside jokes and masterful suspense.

Psycho - famed for its shower murder sequence - was a classic model of shot selection and editing.

Later films offered intriguing amplifications of his main themes. The Birds presented evil as an environmental fact of life.

Marnie, a psychoanalytical thriller along the lines of Spellbound, showed how a violent, sexually tinged childhood episode turns a woman into a thief.

Most notable about Torn Curtain, an espionage story played against a cold war backdrop, was its extended fight-to-the death scene between the protagonist and a Communist agent in the kitchen of a farm house.

He returned to England to produce 1972's Frenzy, a tale in the Hitchcock vein, about an innocent man suspected of being a serial killer.

His final film, Family Plot, pitted two couples against one another: a pair of professional thieves versus a female psychic and her working-class lover.

It was a fitting end to a body of work that demonstrated the eternal symmetry of good and evil.