How Hitchcock preyed on Tippi: She was the iconic star of The Birds - now her bombshell memoir reveals her account of the director's predatory sexual behaviour towards her 

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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.

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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

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.

Tippi, 86 — the mother of actress Melanie Griffith and grandmother of the Fifty Shades Of Grey star Dakota Johnson — charts a powerful man’s transformation from dry- witted charmer to sadistic tormentor worthy of one of his own chilling films.

Hedren had just divorced her first husband, advertising executive Peter Griffith, and had a four-year-old daughter, Melanie, when she met Hitchcock. At 31, her New York modelling career was dwindling and she was considering typing classes.

Hedren was charmed by Hitchcock and his Nottingham-born wife, Alma, who gave her acting lessons. As a Tinseltown outsider, she would have known nothing about rumours of their odd, sexless marriage.

When Alfred Hitchcock offered the starring role in his new film The Birds to a complete unknown, Hollywood was thunderstruck

Tippi, 86, charts a powerful man’s transformation from dry- witted charmer to sadistic tormentor worthy of one of his own chilling films

The Psycho director had declared himself celibate after sleeping once with Alma — producing their daughter, Pat — 33 years earlier.

But Hedren rapidly concluded Hitchcock was playing creepy mind games. His lawyer claimed they had discovered she had a reputation as ‘available to men’ while a model. She was outraged.

Hitchcock then suggested a further screen test in which he would ply her with martinis, asking her ‘provocative’ questions while she lost all her ‘inhibitions’.

‘There was something creepy to me about the idea and the quiet excitement in his voice,’ she says.

That idea never became reality, but, during filming on The Birds, the apocalyptic tale of a Californian town besieged by homicidal birds, she realised Hitchcock had made clear she was his property.

‘Every time I’d be laughing and talking with a male member of the cast or crew, my next exchange with Hitchcock would be icy and a bit petulant,’ she says.

Cast and crew were scared to socialise with her for fear of offending him. Her handsome co-star, Rod Taylor, was ‘given an actual order, almost a threat’ not to touch her. Sean Connery, her co-star on Marnie, was later told the same.

Animal handlers started hurling ‘screaming, frantic’ live ravens and pigeons at her. Five days were spent filming the scene that lasts just a minute on screen

One afternoon, Hedren and Hitchcock were returning to their hotel in his limo. As they pulled up, ‘he threw himself on top of me and tried to kiss me’ in full view of hotel guests and even crew members.

She screamed and pushed him off before storming into the hotel.

The next time he saw her, they were shooting the scene in which she shelters in a phone box as mechanical birds smash into it.

One ‘bird’ managed to break an ostensibly shatterproof window, hurling tiny fragments of glass into Hedren’s face.

She still suspects the supposed accident was his revenge for publicly rejecting her. One night she agreed to dine with Hitchcock as his wife would be there.

The director waited until Alma had left the table before telling a disgusted Hedren how, while filming a scene in To Catch A Thief in which Cary Grant and Grace Kelly started kissing, he had ‘found himself getting aroused’.

Hedren started seeing Hitchcock driving past her house in his limo and discovered he was having her followed by crew members.

Hitch’s disturbing sexual obsession with the American blonde has long been regarded as one of the most notorious actor-director relationships in Hollywood history

In a corner of the film studio one day, he asked her to ‘touch him’. She wanted to slap him, but, she says, actresses dared not do that to powerful directors in Sixties Hollywood. 

‘Sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn’t exist back then,’ says Hedren.

There was a bedroom scene coming, but not the one Hitchcock hoped for — the final violent drama in The Birds in which Hedren’s character ventures upstairs and is almost pecked to death.

As Hitchcock shouted ‘Action!’, animal handlers started hurling ‘screaming, frantic’ live ravens and pigeons at her. Five days were spent filming the scene that lasts just a minute on screen. She finally snapped when a bird pecked too close to her eye.

‘I’m done,’ she said, sitting on the floor and ‘sobbing from sheer exhaustion’ before limping home.

The film was a huge hit and, under the terms of her ‘ironclad’ seven-year contract with Hitchcock, she had to keep doing his bidding.

In Marnie, a psycho-sexual drama, she played a kleptomaniac who is terrified of being touched by men. 

Hitchcock blocked an attempt by Universal to put her up for an Oscar for Marnie and trashing her reputation

Meanwhile, Hitchcock’s obsession with her was escalating. He designed a lavish dressing room for her next door to his bungalow at Universal.

It’s ‘most unnerving feature’, says Hedren, was a back door that led through an alley to his office, allowing him to slip in to see her unnoticed.

Matters finally came to a head when Hitchcock summoned Hedren. He ‘suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me’.

‘It was sexual, it was perverse and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and repulsed.’

The harder she fought him, the more aggressive he became. Finally, his face red with rage, he spat: ‘I’ll ruin your career.’ She shot back, ‘Do what you have to do’ and stormed out.

‘I was shattered, but I wasn’t remorseful,’ she says. ‘I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Refusing Hitchcock that horrible afternoon wasn’t one of them.’

He never spoke directly to her again, communicating through intermediaries.

Hedren started seeing Hitchcock driving past her house in his limo and discovered he was having her followed by crew members

Hitchcock — who claimed they fell out after she called him a fat pig — was as good as his word about her career, blocking an attempt by Universal to put her up for an Oscar for Marnie and trashing her reputation.

She had many film offers, but had to turn them down as she was still under contract to him.

By the time she was free, Hollywood’s interest in her had dwindled. She made more than 30 films, but nothing approaching the calibre of her work with Hitchcock.

Some have rushed to his defence, suggesting the fallout was essentially a clash of egos. His British biographer John Russell Taylor told the Observer yesterday that Hedren was ‘elaborating memories she feels bitter about’.

Kim Novak, another of the director’s icy blonde stars, sniffed that Hitchcock was always a ‘gentleman’ to her.

But Hedren’s point is that, unlike with Hitch’s other actresses, he pulled her up from obscurity and felt she owed him something.

Hedren went on to have a remarkable life devoted largely to animal rescue, setting up a big cats sanctuary in California.

While Hitchcock ruined her acting career, ‘I never gave him the power to ruin my life’, she says.

Just as his films endure, so, too, will the battle over whether the malevolence that the master of suspense created on screen really came to an end when the cameras stopped rolling.

• TIPPI: A Memoir by Tippi Hedren (William Morrow, £20) is published on November 17.