Tippi Hedren has revealed how Alfred Hitchcock allegedly sexually assaulted her while they were working on the films The Birds and Marnie.

The actor has spoken in the past about the director's treatment of her, much of which was portrayed in the 2012 HBO movie The Girl , but she goes into fresh detail in a new autobiography, Tippi: A Memoir.

Hedren said Hitchcock’s abusive behaviour began when he cast Hedren in The Birds, her first film and Hitchcock’s follow-up to Psycho.

Hedren alleges that the director ordered other cast members not to socialise with her or touch her, and grew petulant if he saw her talking to other men.

Real birds

She claims he once threw himself on top of her and tried to kiss her while they were travelling in his limousine. The next day on set, while filming the famous phone booth scene in which Hedren’s character is attacked by birds, she says one of the mechanical crows broke the supposedly shatterproof glass, shards of which hit her in the face. She also says that in a scene where her character was attacked by birds in a bedroom she was told the mechanical birds would not work, and that they would have to use live ones.

She allegedly spent five days filming the scene with live birds being thrown at her and attached to her body with elastic bands. Hedren says she broke down when a bird that had been attached to her shoulder almost pecked her in the eye, and she spent the following week in bed, exhausted.

Hedren suspects that Hitchcock was attempting to punish her for rebuffing his sexual advances.

The next film under Hedren’s contract was Marnie, about a kleptomaniac with mental health problems. It includes a scene in which Hedren’s character is raped by her new husband. Hedren believes that the scene of a man forcing himself on his unattainable, beautiful bride was Hitchcock’s personal fantasy about her.

The director’s behaviour continued, Hedren says, and he commissioned a replica mask of her face for himself, even though it was not needed for the film. He also placed her dressing room next to his office, and was able to enter through a connecting door.

Hitchcock would “find some way to express his obsession with me, as if I owed it to him to reciprocate somehow,” Hedren writes in the new autobiography, and even expressed his love for her directly.

One day, Hedren says, he summoned her to his office. “He suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse and it was ugly,” she writes.

Contract

Hitchcock reportedly grew frustrated at her resistance and threatened to ruin her career. Hedren says he blocked the studio, Universal, when it wanted to submit her performance for an Oscar, and talked disparagingly of her to others.

She was still under contract to him for two more years, and Hitchcock refused to allow her to take work with other directors. This, combined with studios’ reluctance to antagonise Hitchcock, meant her career never recovered.

“Studios were the power,” Hedren said in 2012 . “And I was at the end of that, and there was absolutely nothing I could do legally whatsoever. There were no laws about this kind of a situation. If this had happened today, I would be a very rich woman.” – (Guardian Service)