In a career that spanned sixty years and as many films, Alfred Hitchcock changed the face of cinema with a raft of the most influential films ever made. From The 39 Steps to The Birds, from Rear Window to Vertigo to North by Northwest, from Notorious to Psycho, Hitchcock mastered the language of film and suspense as no one before had. Along the way, as one of the shrewdest self-promoters in film history, he created a persona for himself as Hollywood’s iconic depraved English gentleman—a reputation that would come back to haunt him years after his death. Since his death, the public image of Hitchcock the beloved eccentric has morphed into a sensationalistic but largely fantastical portrait of the director as a dirty old man twisted by sexual obsession. Yet the true Hitchcock was far more complex than the familiar, Poeian portrait: witty, gregarious, urbane, a commercial and artistic genius of the highest order. Patrick McGilligan has garnered the cooperation of hundreds of interviewees who knew Hitch personally, along with access to Hitchcock archives previously unavailable. And his life is not that of a philandering director, but of all things a love story—the unsung story of the partnership of Alfred and Alma, a decades-long creative union strained by artistic tension and marital discord . . . including several episodes of actual adultery never before disclosed. Exhaustive in its research, compelling in its writing, this biography will remake our image of one of the best-known figures of the 20th century.