Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock - Softcover

John Russell Taylor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425075931 ISBN 13: 9780425075937

Publisher: Berkley, 1985

Synopsis

This authorized biography covers the entire span of Hitchcock's career, from his early silent films to his Hollywood successes, and offers revealing insight into his relationships with his stars and his eccentric working methods

About this title

Review:

It's likely that readers who have watched many of Alfred Hitchcock's films can't help but have noticed how frequently he depicts fetishism, sadism, and voyeurism. Because Hitchcock was a reclusive man and a guarded interview subject, almost everyone who writes about him turns to his work for insight into his life. These writers generally conclude that the director himself was possessed by the very pathologies that resound in his movies.

But John Russell Taylor didn't have to go that route. He wrote this biography with the participation and blessings of the man himself. In Hitch, Taylor admits that his subject often projects his fantasies onto the screen. He also provides a good deal of insight into Hitchcock's domineering, obsessively courteous demeanor. But the focus here is on the details of Hitchcock's life, the preparation and production of his movies, and his relationships with the countless cinematic luminaries who worked with him, including Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and James Stewart. --Raphael Shargel

About the Author:

John Russell Taylor is an English critic and author. He was born in Dover and attended Dover Grammar School before obtaining a double first in English from Jesus College, Cambridge.

He is the author of a vast number of critical works on cinema, and of biographies of important Anglo-American film figures including Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock, whom he befriended in LA while teaching at the University of Southern California in the 1970s. Taylor's biography of Hitchcock is the only one to be written with its subject's full cooperation - and led him to write an intensive study of Hollywood's émigré in his book Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950.

Taylor has written regularly for publications such as The Times, Sight and Sound, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times throughout his career and was art critic for The Times until 2005.

He now lives in London and West Wales.

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0425075931
• ISBN 13: 9780425075937
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 333