Alfred Hitchcock | Biography, Movies, The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo ...
Alfred Hitchcock was an English-born American motion-picture director whose suspenseful films and television programs won immense popularity ...
Jack the Ripper
Hitchcock grew up in London’s East End in a milieu once haunted by the notorious serial killer known as <anchor>Jack the Ripper</anchor>, talk of whom was still current in Hitchcock’s youth two decades later. Although he had two siblings, he recalled his youth as a lonely one, with a father who was a stern disciplinarian; it is said that he once ordered Alfred to appear at the local police station with a note saying that he had been misbehaving, whereupon the sergeant on duty (at the request of Hitchcock’s father) locked him up for a few minutes, a sufficient length of time to give Alfred a fear of enclosed spaces and a strong concern for wrongful imprisonment, both of which would figure in his later work. When he was not being disciplined, he was cosseted by an overly watchful mother, who used food as a balm—to which he would later trace his trademark paunch.