Tippi Hedren

Blonde actress/model Tippi Hedren lists the year of her birth as 1935, which means that she would have been 14 or 15 when she appeared fleetingly in her first film, The Petty Girl (1950). Hedren did not resurface on the movie scene again until 1963, when she was “discovered” by Alfred Hitchcock. The official story is that Hitchcock wanted to mold Hedren into a new Grace Kelly; rumors persist that his interest in the actress went way beyond professional, and that he made a few clumsy advances towards her on the set. Whatever the case, Hedren starred in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). She was criticized for being too impassive in the former film and too expressive in the latter, though it isn’t fair to pick on her for the shortcomings of the script and direction. Hedren was under contract not to Hitchcock but to his home studio of Universal; thus, she was obliged to appear in a 1963 Kraft Suspense Theatre episode and in director Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), acquitting herself nicely in both instances. She curtailed her film appearances in the late 1960s when she married her second husband, Noel Marshall. The Marshalls then proceeded to pour 11 years’ work (and $17 million!) into Roar (1981), a film based on their own real-life efforts on behalf of the African wildlife preservation movement. Even three decades after the fact, Hedren can’t quite shake her earlier relationship with Alfred Hitchcock: she played a murder victim in the 1990 TV remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and starred in the made-for-cable The Birds II: Land’s End (1994). Tippi Hedren is the mother of actress Melanie Griffith. —allmovie guide