When Alfred Hitchcock offered the starring role in his new film The Birds to a complete unknown, Hollywood was thunderstruck.
Who was Tippi Hedren? The 31-year-old blonde model, spotted by the director in a diet milkshake commercial, admits now she was as shocked as anyone.
‘Hitch’ hadn’t even bothered to ask if she could act before offering her a seven-year contract and lavishing the budget of a small feature film on preparing her for a screen test.
She was too swept off her feet to wonder if there was any darker motive at play.
With the creeping menace of his thrillers, realisation would dawn all too soon.
Hitch’s disturbing sexual obsession with the American blonde and the cruelty she claims he inflicted when she spurned his advances has long been regarded as one of the most notorious actor-director relationships in Hollywood history.
However, Hedren’s decision to finally write her own account of the director’s predatory sexual behaviour towards her in a memoir, Tippi, published in the UK later this month, has prompted an outcry from some of Hitchcock’s biographers.
They claim the legacy of Britain’s greatest director is being traduced by exaggerated accusations. (more...)
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