Alfred Hitchcock a brief life
"Alfred Hitchcock was a strange child. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition, his childhood was an isolated one, scented with fish from his father's shop. Afraid to leave his bedroom, he would plan great voyages, using railway timetables to plot an exact imaginary route across Europe...
| Main Author: | Ackroyd, Peter, 1949- (Author) |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,
[2015]
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| Edition: | First United States edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: |
"Alfred Hitchcock was a strange child. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition, his childhood was an isolated one, scented with fish from his father's shop. Afraid to leave his bedroom, he would plan great voyages, using railway timetables to plot an exact imaginary route across Europe. So how did this fearful figure become the one of the most respected film directors of the twentieth century? As an adult, Hitch rigorously controlled the press's portrait of him, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring all others out. In this quick-witted portrait, Ackroyd reveals something more: a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashes a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. Iconic film stars make cameo appearances, just as Hitch did in his own films: Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, and James Stewart despair of his detached directing style and, perhaps most famously of all, Tippi Hedren endures cuts and bruises from a real-life fearsome flock of birds. In [this book], Peter Ackroyd wrests the director's chair back from the master of control and discovers what lurks just out of sight, in the corner of the shot,"--Amazon.com. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition-- Hitchcock's childhood was an isolated one. As an adult, Hitch rigorously controlled the press's portrait of him, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring all others out. Ackroyd reveals a jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashes a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. The result is a gripping biography of one of the most respected directors of the twentieth century. |
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| Physical Description: |
276 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-264) and index. |
| ISBN: |
9780385537414 0385537417 |
| Author Notes: |
A constant theme in Ackroyd's work is the blending of past, present, and future, often paralleling the two in his biographies and novels. Much of Ackroyd's work explores the lives of celebrated authors such as Dickens, Milton, Eliot, Blake, and More. Ackroyd's approach is unusual, injecting imagined material into traditional biographies. In The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), his work takes on an autobiographical form in his account of Wilde's final years. He was widely praised for his believable imitation of Wilde's style. He was awarded the British Whitbread Award for biography in 1984 of T.S. Eliot, and the Whitbread Award for fiction in 1985 for his novel Hawksmoor. Ackroyd currently lives in London and publishes one or two books a year. He still considers poetry to be his first love, seeing his novels as an extension of earlier poetic work. (Bowker Author Biography) |