Saturdays with the Stars: Tippi Hedren

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we took a look at the unlikely lead of Torn Curtain, musical superstar Julie Andrews.  This month, we're going to go back a bit in time to one of Hitch's most well-known leading ladies, someone who was featured in two of his films, and has been the most outspoken in recent years about his abhorrent behavior toward her on set.  This month, our star is Tippi Hedren.

Nathalie Kay Hedren (her father nicknamed her "Tippi") was born in New Ulm, Minnesota, the daughter of the general store owner.  An incredible beauty, she left for New York City when she was 20 and quickly signed to a top modeling agency, and appeared on the front pages of dozens of major magazines, as well as in commercials when she moved to Los Angeles after her divorce to actor Peter Griffith (with whom she had her movie star daughter, Melanie).  It was in one of these commercials that she first caught Alfred Hitchcock's eye, and he signed her to a contract.  Hedren later claimed she had no idea that he intended to put her in the lead of one of his movies (assuming he wanted her for a role in his television series), but at the age of 33 she was headed to immortality as Melanie Daniels in The Birds.

I have seen The Birds many times through the years, and it is brilliant (and Hedren is brilliant in it).  I have never seen Marnie, probably the most famous Hitchcock movie I hadn't seen before this project, which is why I can include Hedren in this series that requires me to only watch movies I've never seen before.  But I also wanted really badly to include Hedren, more than any other actress (I wouldn't have done the series without her), because she has been the most outspoken in interviews in recent years about the way that Hitchcock treated her on set, harassing & controlling her in ways that even some of his other leading ladies have admitted they didn't have to go through with the director.  We'll get into some of the allegations, and what they mean for Hitchcock & his legacy when we talk about Marnie, but in a series that has focused on the incredible women, performances, and roles that Hitchcock's movies highlighted, I would be remiss if we hadn't devoted time to one of the women who found Hitchcock to be unacceptable in his methods.

This month, though, we're also going to get beyond Hedren's association with Hitchcock, and the unusual turns that her career took in the years following her association with the director, working immediately with a director just as famous as Hitchcock in her next picture, and eventually spending nearly a decade filming a movie that would lead to Hedren's true calling, nature conservation.  This month, we'll look not just at Hitchcock's last two great classic movies, but also at the woman who made it possible, and what happened when she escaped his shadow.