Hitchcock, Alfred Joseph, Sir

1899 - Alfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August in Leytonstone, Essex (now London), the second son and youngest of the three children of William Hitchcock, a greengrocer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock (née Whelan).

1920 - He obtained a full-time job at Islington Studios under its American owners, Famous Players-Lasky, and their British successors, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies.

1922 - Began his directing career in the United Kingdom.

1925 - Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to direct his first film, The Pleasure Garden made at Ufa studios in Germany.

1926 - Made his debut in the thriller genre. The resulting film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was a major commercial and critical success.     

   - He was to marry his assistant director Alma Reville. Then later had a daughter named Patricia.

1929 - Began to work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures.

1933 - He was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation.

1934 - 1935 - His first film for the company at GBPC, The Man Who Knew Too Much , was a success and his second, The 39 Steps, is often considered one of the best films from his early period.

1938 - Next major success, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany)

1942 - Saboteur,  was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal, a studio where he would work in his later years.

1946 - Notorious, marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as director.

1948 - Filmed his first colour film, Rope, which appeared

1980 - Was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in the New Years Honours.   

     - He died just four months later, on the 29th of April, before he had the opportunity to be formally invested by the Queen.

1956 - Despite the brief period between his knighthood and death, he was nevertheless entitled to be known as Sir Alfred Hitchcock and to use the postnominal letters "KBE", because he remained a British subject when he adopted American citizenship

Hitchcock usually made a fleeting appearance in a bit part in each of his films.

• "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."