White wonderfully describes him as a “curious brew of J. But on the other hand, it was through women that “he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself”. On the one hand, “he surrounded himself with women, sought out their friendship, gave them responsibilities and opportunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work”. White describes Hitchock’s relationship to women as “complex” and “contradictory”. More from this author Norman Mailer: prisoner of sex He also had to educate actors to work along his lines, and this dictatorial approach to female actors, especially, is the most troubling aspect of his career. Nevertheless, all his scripts had to have a “Hitchcock touch”: “The biggest trouble”, he once said, “is to educate writers to work along my lines”. Unlike Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino, “when it came to screenwriting, Hitchcock relied on the talents of others”. But he was never the sole “author” of his films. Hitchcock was christened as such by La Nouvelle Vague, that avant-garde movement from the country that invented the cinema. And it is childishness, this desire for control, that, paradoxically, fuelled his status as an auteur. Like a child playing with his favourite toys, he preferred to work on sets rather than locations. He was scared of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict of any sort. He retained in later life all the fears and anxieties of his childhood. When his father married his mother, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Both parents had Irish backgrounds, but his father was raised in the Church of England. He loved the West End, and grew up in the culture of music halls and pubs. As a boy, he read Edgar Allen Poe, John Buchan, and G.K Chesterton - works of fiction that combined cheap thrills with weightier metaphysical themes of dread and alienation. Through these themes an answer to that question emerges. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock examines Hitchcock thematically.

How did a greengrocer’s son from the East End of London, end up, by the time Marnie was being shot, the most powerful film director in the world? Edward White’s enjoyable jaunt through the different aspects of Alfred Hitchcock is not a straightforward biography we don’t go from baby Hitch at the twilight of Victorian England to a portly octogenarian in sunlit California. Hedren later accused Hitchcock of sexually harassing her in Marnie, their final film together. The fact she wasn’t a star meant Hitchcock had greater leeway to exercise his Pygmalion instincts: he instructed her on what to wear, what to eat, what friends to see, and he isolated her from the other actors. He first cast her in The Birds, his dreamscape horror film set in northern California. But on the basis of that advert alone Hitchcock offered her a five-year contract on $500 a week. In 1961, when his wife Alma pointed him to a drinks ad on TV, Hitchcock had a coup de foudre: he had found another blonde.

Ingrid Bergman fit the mould but then she ran off with Roberto Rossellini. And he treated the stars who played these roles like mannequins. Elegantly-dressed, blonde, with an inscrutable surface concealing a subterranean sexuality. There was only one woman in Alfred Hitchcock’s life.

Alfred hitchcoc