Notorious

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.

Ingrid Bergman began her acting career in Sweden in the 1930s before Hollywood producer David O. Selznick brought her to the United States in 1939 to remake her Swedish hit "Intermezzo." She became one of the era's most acclaimed leading women, working in English, Swedish, and Italian across a career spanning more than five decades, and won three competitive Academy Awards, a rare feat matched by few actors of any era. Her international stardom was interrupted in the late 1940s by a public scandal when she left her husband for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini while still married, a relationship condemned on the floor of the United States Senate; she worked mainly in Europe with Rossellini through the following years before an American comeback sealed by her second Best Actress Oscar for "Anastasia" (1956). Bergman starred opposite Cary Grant twice for Alfred Hitchcock, in "Notorious" (1946), a wartime espionage thriller opposite Grant and Claude Rains, and again in the lighter romantic comedy "Indiscreet" (1958), after both her exile and comeback. She continued working until shortly before her death in 1982, winning her third Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress, for "Murder on the Orient Express" (1974).

William Claude Rains was born in London on 10 November 1889, the son of stage actor Frederick Rains. He grew up with a pronounced cockney accent and, according to biographical accounts, a stammer, both of which he worked to eliminate through years of voice training as he built a stage career in London beginning in the early 1900s, eventually working under and studying alongside figures at His Majesty's Theatre. He served in the London Scottish Regiment during the First World War and was gassed, which left a lasting effect on his voice — one that, combined with his training, produced the distinctive, cultivated diction for which he later became known. Rains built a substantial British and Broadway stage career through the 1920s before Hollywood took note of him relatively late, at age forty-three, and cast him — sight unseen by cinema audiences for most of the film — as the title character in The Invisible Man (1933), whose face remains hidden until the closing scene. The film established him in American pictures, and he became one of the era's most sought character actors, equally convincing as villains, corrupt officials and men of hidden decency. His most enduring roles came across the 1930s and 1940s: the crooked senator opposite James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and the morally ambiguous Vichy police chief Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942), whose closing line about "the usual suspects" became one of cinema's most quoted. He received four Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor across his career and never won. He continued working into the 1960s, including a role in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Rains died in Laconia, New Hampshire, on 30 May 1967, at seventy-seven.