Loosely based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story of the same name, The Birds is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most renowned films, which launched the Hollywood career of Tippi Hedren. A year later, she starred in the director’s psychological drama, Marnie.
Years later, it came to light that Hitchcock had made inappropriate advances toward Hedren during filming and restricted her career in the industry using an ironclad contract.
Hedren shared parts of the story over the years, most memorably with the makers of the 2012 HBO TV film The Girl, which was based on her turbulent relationship with Hitchcock. She revealed more in her 2016 autobiography, Tippi: A Memoir.
“It’s about time I stop letting everyone else tell my story and finally tell it myself,” she wrote.
Hedren was divorced and a single mother to future actress Melanie Griffith when Hitchcock cast her in The Birds after spotting her in a commercial, and then in Marnie.
Hitchcock allegedly made it clear to her castmates that she was his “property” and warned her male co-stars, Rod Taylor (The Birds) and Sean Connery (Marnie), to stay away from her. One day, Hitchcock forced a kiss on her, she said, in front of cast and crew members. She screamed, shoved him off, and ran away.
The next day, Hedren was to film the famous scene in The Birds, in which her character, Melanie, tries to make a call from a phone booth amid a violent bird attack. Somehow, the mechanical birds broke the supposedly shatterproof glass of the booth, and shards found their way all over her face.
Hedren said in her memoir that it might have been Hitchcock’s way of punishing her for “rejecting him and doing it so publicly.”
Another time, the director allegedly cornered her on the set and asked her to touch him. She also accused him of having her followed and analyzing her handwriting.
The final blow came when Hitchcock used real ravens, doves, and pigeons to pelt her for the climactic scene in the bedroom. She trusted the trainer, Ray Berwick, but knew that “not even the greatest trainer in the world could control every move an animal makes, especially when it’s under stress.”
“It was ugly, brutal, and relentless,” she wrote. The sequence was filmed over five days, and the film’s crew reportedly found the final day the most “horrifying and heartbreaking.”
Cary Grant, who was visiting the set, told her, “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever seen.”
On that day, a few birds were tied to her body, and one nearly pecked her eyes out, after which Hedren yelled, “I’m done.”
“The birds were untied from me, and I just sat there on the floor, unable to move, and began sobbing from sheer exhaustion.”
She kept fading in and out of consciousness over the weekend and had to be awakened by her daughter at one point. She was under medical supervision for a week after passing out in her dressing room the next day.
However, there are some conflicting accounts on the filming of the bedroom sequence. Some who were on set at the time said that Hedren was never in real danger, was not injured, and that there was no tension on set.
Regardless, Hedren essentially never spoke to Hitchcock again after the release of Marnie in 1964.
Hitchcock kept her bound to an exclusive multi-year contract she had signed before working on his movies, and continued to pay the $500 agreed-upon salary, preventing her from taking on other projects.
She told her granddaughter, Dakota Johnson, in a December 2016 Vogue issue, that Hitchcock’s last words to her were: “I’ll ruin your career.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.boredpanda.com ’
