The Ottawa Citizen (07/Jan/1989) - Hitchcock called 'sick'

Details

• article: Hitchcock called 'sick'
• newspaper: The Ottawa Citizen (07/Jan/1989)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Marnie (1964), The Birds (1963), Tippi Hedren

Article

Hitchcock called 'sick'

NEW YORK (AP)

Actress Melanie Griffith says director Alfred Hitchcock was "sick" and helped sour her relationship with her parents because of his obsession with her mother, Tippi Hedren.

"He didn't like kids," she said in an interview in the Jan. 23 issue of US magazine. "He never wanted me on the set and I felt like he took mom away from me, which he did. He was obsessed with her."

Hedren starred in Hitchcock's thrillers The Birds and Marnie.

Griffith said that, when she was six, Hitchcock "sent me a box shaped like a coffin, and inside was a miniature of my mother, exactly the way she looked in The Birds.

"He was sick," she added.

Griffith, 31, star of the box-office hit Working Girl, is the only child of Hedren and developer Peter Griffith, who divorced when she was four.

She recently reconciled with her parents after a long estrangement. Her son, Alexander, 3 1/2, helped her realize she was partly to blame for the rift.

"When you have a child, you realize what your parents went through," said Griffith, who is divorced from the child's father, actor Steven Bauer. She is engaged to marry ex-husband Don Johnson.