(1899 – 1980) British-born director whose fifty-three films successfully straddled the worlds of art house and boxoffice yield. His first Hollywood production, Rebecca (1940), won the 1940 Academy Award for Best Picture. Hitchcock is famed for the control he exercised over all aspects of the film-making process, his amazing visual acumen and the haunting pervasiveness of his images in the collective unconscious. Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963) indelibly altered American experiences of neighbors, showering and household pets, filling everyday America with shadows and ambiguity. His characters, similarly are perpetually poised between the mendacity of order and the truth of chaos, where guilt and innocence, obsession and deliverance, nightmare and vision are forever flip sides of the same human coin.