March 12: Alfred Hitchcock Day

Alfred Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 and died on 29 April 1980, so it isn't clear why Alfred Hitchcock Day is celebrated on 12 March. Anyway, it is, so here are 10 things you may not know about the iconic film director:

1. He made a career out of scaring people - and had a few phobias of his own. He claimed to be frightened of watching his own films and would never go to see them. He claimed to have a phobia of Eggs, especially the yolks, and said he had never eaten one. Also, he had a fear of the police. This is thought to be because, when he was a child, his father sent him to the police station with a note. The policeman on duty read it, then locked the young Alfred in a cell for several minutes, saying, "this is what happens when you do bad things." This phobia not only influenced the plots of a number of his films, but was also the reason Hitchcock never learned to drive.
2. Before working in film, Hitchcock had a number of short stories published in the in-house magazine of Henley's, where he was working as a draughtsman. His first story was called Gas, and was about a young woman who believes she is being assaulted in Paris - but the whole thing turns out to be a hallucination under dental anaesthetic. In another story, Fedora, the description of the heroine exactly fitted his future wife, Alma, even though he had not met her yet.
3. His first job in the film industry was as a title designer.
4. As a director, he was not an immediate success. His first project in 1922, Number 13, was cancelled after only a few scenes had been filmed because of financial problems; the next two, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, were flops. However, after directing his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, his luck began to change.
5. The first British feature film with sound was a Hitchcock film, Blackmail.
6. Alfred Hitchcock is known for appearing in a cameo role in most of his films. In later films, his cameo would appear early in the film, because audiences got distracted from the main plot because they were looking out for Alfred Hitchcock.
7. The use of famous landmarks as backdrops to the action was another Hitchcock trademark. The British Museum and the Royal Albert Hall have both been used. However, Hitchcock was not always granted access to his chosen locations. He was not permitted to have Cary Grant climb up Abraham Lincoln's nose on the Mount Rushmore sculpture; and Disneyland was also off limits, because Walt Disney thought that Psycho was a disgusting film and would not allow Hitchcock to film in his theme park.
8. Hitchcock is known for popularising a plot device known as a "MacGuffin", an item or idea which is a motivation for the protagonist, and drives the plot initially, but becomes less important as the plot develops, and may be entirely forgotten by the end. A MacGuffin may be a spy's papers, a stolen necklace or other item people are searching for (According to George Lucas, in Star Wars, R2D2 is the MacGuffin).
9. He is the "voice" of the Jaws ride at Universal Studios.
10. The iconic silhouette of Hitchcock which appears at the beginning of the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents was drawn by Alfred Hitchcock himself.