Alfred Hitchcock^†

He started as a title card designer for silent films and talked his way into directing within five years. The Lodger (1927) was his first real success, the template he'd run for 50 more years: innocent man, wrong accusation, elaborate trap. David O. Selznick signed him to Hollywood in 1939, and Rebecca won Best Picture in 1940. The franchise he really built was himself. By the 1950s, "a Hitchcock film" was a complete description, not just a credit.

Vertigo flopped on release in 1958, and Hitchcock withheld distribution rights to it, along with four other films, for the rest of his life, leaving them to his heirs as an asset. After his death, Universal paid a reported $6 million for distribution rights. Sight & Sound voted it the greatest film ever made in 2012. His harassment of Tippi Hedren during The Birds, which she detailed in her 2016 memoir, is now inseparable from his canonization. Film schools still teach him. The reputation holds both.

His cameos started by accident. A bit actor didn't show for The Lodger in 1927, so Hitchcock stepped in. He kept doing it in 38 more films, eventually placing himself early in each so audiences would stop watching for him instead of the plot. His lifelong fear of police traced to a childhood incident: his father sent him to the local station with a note, and an officer locked him in a cell for ten minutes. A man who made a career manufacturing dread had a surprisingly easy list of weaknesses.

He was knighted in January 1980 but too ill to travel to London, so the British consul general brought his papers to Universal Studios. He died on April 29, 1980. His planned final film, The Short Night, never got past the script stage. His ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.