In a career that spanned six decades and more than 60 films, Alfred Hitchcock set became the most widely recognised director who ever lived. His films - including "The 39 Steps," "Notorious," "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "Psycho" and "The Birds" - set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling élan. Since his death, Hitchcock has become crystallised in the public imagination as the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable biography draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man - the ingenious craftsman, the avid collaborator, the constant trickster, provocateur, and romantic. Like Hitchcock's best films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humor, and cliffhanger suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.