North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, east London, in 1899, the son of a greengrocer, and entered the film industry in 1919 designing title cards before directing his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925. By the early 1930s he was already known in Britain as the "master of suspense" for films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps, and in 1939 producer David O. Selznick brought him to Hollywood, where Rebecca (1940) won the Academy Award for Best Picture in his first American year. Over the following four decades Hitchcock built the most recognisable directorial identity in commercial cinema: the audience implicated in guilt and voyeurism, the ordinary man wrongly accused, the blonde heroine in danger, and a visual grammar of subjective camera and precise editing that he called "pure cinema." He was equally shrewd about his own image, hosting Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television from 1955 and cultivating the silhouette and deadpan persona that made him one of the few directors as famous as his stars. His four films with Cary Grant, spread across eighteen years, form one of the most studied actor-director partnerships in film history. Hitchcock used Grant's established charm as raw material to be complicated and, at times, weaponised — casting him as a possible wife-murderer in Suspicion, a compromised government agent in Notorious, a reformed jewel thief in To Catch a Thief, and an innocent man mistaken for a spy in North by Northwest. Each film asked audiences to hold their trust in Grant's likability against genuine suspicion of his character, a tension only Hitchcock exploited so directly. Hitchcock received an Academy Honorary Award in 1968 and was knighted shortly before his death in 1980, closing a career that had produced more influential and imitated films than perhaps any director's in the history of the medium.

Eva Marie Saint trained at the Actors Studio in New York and worked extensively in live television drama before her film debut in Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. That first screen role won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, an unusually immediate consecration for a newcomer. She went on to a long, steady career across film and television rather than a run of immediate star vehicles, appearing in "Raintree County" (1957) and later in "Exodus" (1960). Her collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on "North by Northwest" (1959) placed her opposite Cary Grant as Eve Kendall, a role written with deliberate sexual frankness for the period, and remains her best-remembered part. Saint continued working steadily for decades afterward, including television roles into the 2000s, and received an Emmy Award and further nominations across her career. She was among the last surviving major cast members of "North by Northwest" and of the classic Actors Studio generation, living to nearly one hundred years old.

James Mason was born in 1909 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and educated at Cambridge University, where he read architecture before turning to acting against his family's wishes. He built a stage career in Britain through the 1930s and became one of the country's biggest box-office draws of the wartime years in melodramas such as The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945), often cast as a brooding, cultivated cad. He moved to Hollywood in 1947 and spent the rest of his career working on both sides of the Atlantic, refusing to be typed as either purely British or purely American in his roles. His American period produced some of his most enduring work: he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for A Star Is Born (1954) opposite Judy Garland, played Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962), and portrayed the smooth, sinister spy Phillip Vandamm opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). Mason worked prolifically into the 1980s, appearing in The Verdict (1982) opposite Paul Newman, for which he received his second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor. He died in 1984 in Lausanne, Switzerland, having appeared in well over 100 films. His legacy rests on a distinctive quality rare among leading men of his generation: an ability to make intelligence itself seem dangerous, delivered in one of the most recognizable voices in film history, its clipped, purring cadence imitated by impressionists for decades.

Bernard Herrmann was born Max Herman in New York City on 29 June 1911, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He studied at New York University and the Juilliard School, and by his early twenties was composing and conducting for CBS Radio, where he led the CBS Symphony Orchestra and worked closely with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theatre on the Air, including the 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast. That collaboration carried into film: Herrmann's first score was for Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and the same year he won the Oscar for The Devil and Daniel Webster. Through the 1940s and 1950s he built a body of concert and film work marked by unconventional orchestration — low brass, unusual string writing, ostinato figures repeated to hypnotic effect — that departed sharply from the lush Romantic idiom of most Hollywood scoring of the period. His most celebrated period was his partnership with Alfred Hitchcock, beginning with The Trouble with Harry (1955) and running through Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964). The screeching string figure he wrote for Psycho's shower scene, over Hitchcock's initial instruction that the scene have no music at all, became one of the most recognized passages in film history. The partnership ended in 1966 when Hitchcock, under studio pressure to modernize, rejected Herrmann's score for Torn Curtain and fired him; the two men never spoke again. Herrmann continued scoring films into the 1970s, including Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Scorsese's Taxi Driver, which he completed the day before he died in Los Angeles on 24 December 1975. It was released the following year and earned him a posthumous Academy Award nomination.

Robert Burks was born in Chino, California, in 1909 and became Alfred Hitchcock's regular cinematographer, shooting twelve of the director's films across thirteen years from Strangers on a Train (1951) to Marnie (1964), a run interrupted only by Psycho, which Hitchcock shot with his television crew. Burks photographed two of the films that most fixed Grant's screen image in its final, most polished form. To Catch a Thief (1955), shot largely on location on the French Riviera opposite Grace Kelly, used Burks's VistaVision color photography to turn Grant, at fifty-one, into an image of tanned, tailored ease against the Mediterranean coastline; the film won Burks the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. North by Northwest (1959) followed, its widescreen compositions — the Mount Rushmore climax, the crop-duster sequence shot on an open Indiana highway — becoming some of the most recognizable images in Grant's entire career. Burks's other credits with Hitchcock include Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963), giving him a hand in shaping the visual identity of Hitchcock's most celebrated decade. He worked in Technicolor, VistaVision and a range of aspect ratios, adapting his lighting and camera style to each film's demands rather than imposing a single signature look. Burks died in a house fire in Fresno, California, in 1968, along with his wife, ending a partnership with Hitchcock that had defined an era of American studio cinematography.

Ernest Lehman began his career as a Broadway press agent and short-story writer before turning to screenwriting in the 1950s, bringing an insider's eye for showbusiness cynicism to his early scripts. His novella "Tell Me About It Tomorrow" became the basis for "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), which he co-wrote with Clifford Odets, a portrait of a vicious Broadway columnist widely regarded as one of the sharpest American screenplays of its decade. Lehman worked across an unusually wide range of genres and tones — adapting Tennessee Williams for "The Sweet Bird of Youth" era, writing the espionage thriller that became "North by Northwest" (1959) directly for the screen at Alfred Hitchcock's request, and later adapting large-scale musicals including "West Side Story" (1961) and "The Sound of Music" (1965), both of which he also produced. He received Academy Award nominations for "Sabrina" (1954), "North by Northwest" (1959), "West Side Story" (1961), and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), which he also produced and which was the first film he directed. In 2001 he became the first screenwriter to receive an Honorary Academy Award for career achievement, recognition of a body of work that moved fluently between comedy, thriller, and musical.