We’re all pretty much familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s name, films and his famous silhouette. Apart from murders and making people’s spines shiver with his scripts about murders, he was also fond of appearing in his own films as a cameo.

Master of suspense

1. Only 13 out of his 52 movies do not feature him. There came a point that his cameos were so popular that he started to make his appearances early in the films, before the plot thickened, so as not to distract the audience from it. There were two cases in which Hitchcock faced a challenge regarding his cameo. One was in the film “Rope” whose story takes place in one single flat and with very few characters. What did he do? He introduced his outlined figure in the form of a red neon sign.

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Then, it was “Lifeboat”, where he faced again the challenge of appearing without taking over with his cameo and this time he got around it with a photograph of his on the page of a newspaper, as an ad for the fake weight-loss product”Reduco”.

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2. There’s some pretty fascinating trivia about Hitchcock, too. Like the fact that he had actually read of a real-life incident that occurred further down the coast at Capitola, when hundreds of frenzied Sooty Shearwaters started vomiting anchovies and attacking homes on August 18, 1961. Yup! You guessed it: “The Birds” was born.

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3. His film “North by Northwest” is misnamed -no such point of the compass exists.

4. Did you know that Alfred Hitchcock was a train spotter?

5. Or that his acceptance speech for winning his only Oscar -the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award- was only five words long? “Thank you very much indeed”. Although, the last three words are inaudible.

 

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6. Another great mind of the era designed the dream sequence in “Spellbound”. Can you guess who?

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Yes, of course it’s Salvador Dali.

7. Oh, and you remember “Psycho”. Do you know how the master of horror movies tried to protect the film when it got out in the theatres? Well, “Psycho” is originally a book by Robert Bloch, so Hitchcock tried to buy all the copies of the book so that no one would know how it ended before seeing the film.

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Julia Horeftari for Art-Sheep