Alfred Hitchcock - Patrick McGilligan

In a career that spanned six decades and more than sixty films, Alfred Hitchcock became the most widely recognised director who ever lived. His films – including The 39 Steps, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds – set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling elan. Since his death, Hitchcock has become crystallised in the public imagination as the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable biography draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man –the ingenious craftsman, the avid collaborator, the constant trickster, provocateur andromantic. Like Hitchcock's best films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humour and cliff hanging suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.