Edmonton Journal (24/Jul/1994) - Hitchcock was obsessed, Hedren says

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• article: Hitchcock was obsessed, Hedren says
• newspaper: Edmonton Journal (24/Jul/1994)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Marnie (1964), Sean Connery, The Birds (1963), Tippi Hedren

Article

Hitchcock was obsessed, Hedren says

She was cast in the 1963 classic The Birds after director Alfred Hitchcock caught sight of her "cool blond" looks on a TV commercial.

But Tippi Hedren said goodbye to "Hitch" — and what appeared to be a promising film career — after their second collaboration, 1964's psychosexual thriller Marnie, which also starred Sean Connery.

"The relationship got very, very strange because he became very obsessed with me, and obsession is not a wonderful way to live," says Hedren, 58, in Toronto recently to shoot a TV movie.

Although Hedren (divorced at the time with a young daughter — film actor Melanie Griffith) was scheduled to make a third Hitchcock film, she got out of her contract and made her next movie with Charlie Chaplin at the helm.

A Countess From Hong Kong, which starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, was highly anticipated but a disaster — "an unfunny, mindless mess," said one critic at the time.

Still, Hedren preferred that experience to Hitchcock's dictatorial style.

"He really just wanted to run my life and that's very difficult. If you're going to play Svengali you better take somebody that's 18 years old and hasn't formulated a life yet. . . . I had my own life to live and wasn't interested in what to eat and who to see and where to go."

Griffith has said previously that Hitchcock was "sick," citing one incident in which the director sent her — only six years old at the time — a box shaped like a coffin with a miniature of her mother in it.

"He had gone to great extremes to have a very wonderful doll made, it was a Christmas gift and it was not meant to hurt her in any way," says Hedren.

"It unfortunately looked so real, it wasn't a cute little caricature of her mom, it looked like I did and that was scary."

At one time estranged, Hedren and Griffith appeared together in this month's Vanity Fair with a leggy-looking Hedren decked out in a leopard-print mini-dress and high heels. (Hedren says the photo shoot was impromptu: "I literally went over to have lunch with her that day.")

Although she's worked in film and TV over the years, Hedren's career never really got back on track after she ended her association with Hitchcock.

Part of the reason was her decision to open Shambala, a 25-hectare big cat preserve in Acton, Calif., in 1972 after falling in love with the animals while shooting two movies in Africa.

The other contributing factor was poor film choices.

She made such forgettable movies as 1968's Tiger by the Tail opposite Christopher George and Charo, and Satan's Harvest (1969) with George Montgomery.

Then there was the 1973 cult film The Harrad Experiment.

"Gidget meets Masters and Johnson," said The TimeOut Film Guide about the movie which looked at a coed college where students were encouraged to have sex with each other. The film was notable for pairing Hedren, who played a sexologist, with Don Johnson (Griffith's future husband) as the campus stud.

Over the years, she has also made guest appearances on such TV shows as Hart to Hart, In the Heat of the Night, and Murder She Wrote, and has had a recurring role on the CBS soap The Bold and the Beautiful.

She has recently been cast as Judith's mother in the critically acclaimed HBO series Dream On, seen on The Movie Network in Canada.

But her latest acting assignment was in Treacherous Beauties, a made-for-TV movie based on a Harlequin romance novel that amounted to two weeks of work in Toronto.

The romantic-mystery stars Emma Samms (Dynasty) as a photojournalist searching for her brother's murderer. Hedren plays the matriarch of a wealthy family that includes Catherine Oxenberg (Dynasty), Bruce Greenwood (St. Elsewhere) and Mark Humphrey (E.N.G.).

Produced by Toronto-based Alliance Communications and the CBS television network in the United States, Treacherous Beauties is the first of four movies scheduled to be made from Harlequin books for broadcast on CTV in Canada.