Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (meaning he was knighted) (13 August 1899 - 29 April 1980) was a highly influential British director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres.

He directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of talkies, to the color era.

Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly recognizable directors in the world during his lifetime, and remains one of the best known and most popular directors of all time, famous for his expert and largely unrivalled control of pace and suspense throughout his movies.

Entertainment Weekly went so far as to give him the title of the greatest film director ever.

In Rear Window, after L. B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by saying, "What do you want of me?"

Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time - at this point, audiences often gasp.

Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their droll humor. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding.

This often involves a transference of guilt in which the "innocent" character's failings are transferred to another character, and magnified. Another common theme is the basic incompatibility of men and women; Hitchcock's films often take a cynical view of traditional romance.

Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience.

Most of Hitchcock's films contain cameo appearances by Hitchcock himself: the director would be seen for a brief moment boarding a bus, crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the courtyard, or appearing in a photograph.

This playful gesture became one of Hitchcock's signatures.

As a recurring theme he would carry a musical instrument - especially memorable was the large double bass case that he wrestles onto the train at the beginning of Strangers on a Train.

Hitchcock claimed that on one occasion early in his life, after he had acted childishly, his father sent him to the local police station carrying a note. When he presented the police officer on duty with the note, he was locked in a cell for a few moments, long enough to be petrified.

This was a favorite anecdote of his, and the incident is often cited in connection with the theme of distrust of police, which runs through many of his films.

His mother would often make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. This would be recalled by the character Norman Bates in Psycho.

Hitchcock's first color film, Rope appeared in 1948.

Here Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat.

He also experimented with exceptionally long takes - up to ten minutes (see Themes and devices).

Featuring James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of an eventual four films Stewart would make for Hitchcock. Based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s, Rope is also among several films with homosexual subtext to emerge from the Hays Office-controlled Hollywood studio era.

Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, although four others were nominated. Hitchcock never won the Academy Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967, but never personally received an Academy Award of Merit.

One of Hitchcock's favorite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was what he called the "MacGuffin." The Oxford English Dictionary, however, credits Hitchcock's friend, the Scottish screenwriter Angus McPhail, as being the true inventor of the term. Hitchcock defined this term in an interview to François Truffaut, in 1966. Hitchcock would use this plot device extensively. Many of his suspense films revolve around this device: a detail which, by inciting curiosity and desire, drives the plot and motivates the actions of characters within the story, but whose specific identity and nature is unimportant to the spectator of the film.