hcock and Tippi (left, in 4) only filmed two movies ether, including The Birds ve) before a bitter fallout ause of his obsession.
CAREER BUT NOT MY LIFE, THE ACTRESS DECLARES
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ot only is Tippi Hedren the woman that so captivated director Alfred Hitchcock, she’s also the woman who, far before any hint of the #MeToo movement, stood up to Hollywood heavyweights. The actress, who celebrated her 90th birthday on January 19, first shot to fame in Hitchcock’s The Birds, after he saw her in a commercial for a diet soft drink and demanded his people “find that girl”. While the Minnesota-born model owes her career to Hitchcock, he was also the person who single-handedly ruined it after Tippi, just two movies into a seven-year contract with him, rejected his advances and harassment. “I’ll ruin your career!” he yelled at the young actress as she declared she was leaving. “Do what you have to do,” she replied.
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Now, 6 years on, ippi has proved to the world that she’s so much more than the object of a difficult director’s desire – a man whom she looks back on today with a mix of “admiration, gratitude and utter disgust”. Born Nathalie Kay Hedren in 1930, she became ‘Tippi’ at age four, when her father Bernard bestowed her with the nickname and it stuck. Acting was never part of her plan. When Tippi turned 20, she bought a one-way ticket to New York, working as a very successful fashion model in the 1950s and early 1960s. She married and divorced actor Peter Griffith, with whom she had daughter Melanie, before relocating to California in 1961. It was the year Tippi’s life changed, when her agent received a call that Hitchcock wanted her for his new movie, a follow-up to Psycho. “I was given an incredible gift,” she says. “The bookings were waning and I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to change my life.’” Assuming Hitchcock wanted her for a small part in a TV series, Tippi was stunned to learn she’d be playing the lead
New Zealand Woman’s Weekly
he Birds – her first credited , and one that would even her a Golden Globe. ut alongside her fairytale ent into Hollywood’s elite a dark undercurrent. itchcock developed an ession with Tippi, whom he rred to as ‘The Girl’. No-one else was allowed to speak with, touch or interact with her on set. She wasn’t permitted to do anything without notifying the director, and he controlled what she wore, ate and drank. He also made many sexual advances towards her, all of which she rebuffed, and subjected her to a terrifying filming environment, including a horrific experience with real-life ravens for the film’s final scene. “It was awful,” she recalls, adding that Hitchcock had Tippi’s gorgeous girls (from left) Dakota, Melanie and Stella Banderas.
previously promised the birds would be mechanical − “They were not.” On one particular occasion, Tippi remembers the director throwing himself on top of her and trying to kiss her in the back of a limo. “It was an awful, awful moment,” she says, and admits to not telling anyone about it because “sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn’t exist in the 1960s”. It was halfway through filming Marnie that Tippi finally snapped, and while she finished the movie she never made another with Hitchcock, who made good on his promise to sabotage her career. “I’ve made it my mission ever since to see to it that while Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life,” she tells. Though she continued to act, Tippi dedicated much of her life to animal activism. She founded
