By Andrew Atkinson EXCLUSIVE
Bob Hitchcock and wife Tina from Peacehaven, Brighton, have travelled around the world – with the tag of the famous Hitchcock surname.
The Leader caught up with Bob and Tina in Los Alcázares, Murcia, on holiday at the four star Costa Narejos Hotel.
“We have been in Spain for two weeks – and I’d like to say we’ve done a show in Spain, but we haven’t!,” quipped Bob.
Sir Alfred Hitchcock KBE, was an English filmmaker widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema.
In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, many of which are still widely watched and studied today.
His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), helped to shape the thriller genre, and Blackmail (1929) was the first British “talkie”.
His thrillers The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century.
Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Hitchcock nominated as Best Director, he was also nominated for Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945).
Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M for Murder (1954) followed, along with directing four films, often ranked among the greatest of all time.
Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960), the first and last of these garnering him Best Director nominations.
The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) were also financially successful and are highly regarded by film historians.
Hitchcock made multiple films with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including four with Cary Grant in the 1940s and 1950s, three with Ingrid Bergman in the last half of the 1940s, four with James Stewart over a ten-year span commencing in 1948, and three with Grace Kelly in the mid-1950s.
In 2012, Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo, starring Stewart, displaced Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute’s greatest film ever made, based on its world-wide poll of hundreds of film critics.
As of 2021, nine of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted in December that year, four months before his death on 29 April 1980.
“The cases have caught a lot of attention during our holidays all around the world,” added Tina.
Caption: Bob Hitchcock: Hitchcocks cases caught world attention.
