Hitchcock also did not want Hedren to break the taut atmosphere on the Marnie set. Connery was scheduled to begin filming as Bond in Goldfinger in March and there was no room for postponements. Hedren’s memoir maintains she requested a long weekend away, but Lee Moral claims the records in the Los Angeles library show the awards evening was held in the middle of a week of scheduled filming.Ī memo from Universal publicity manager David Golding sent in January advised Hitchcock that it was impractical for Hedren to fly to New York. The biggest row between director and his star, all parties agree, was over Hedren’s plan to attend an awards event in New York held by Photoplay Magazine in February 1964, during the filming of Marnie, an intense pyschological thriller about abuse co-starring Sean Connery. Only two chapters in the new memoir are about Hitchcock, who died in 1980, as most of the book chronicles Hedren’s passion for filming with lions and other big cats and the creation of her wildlife reserve near the Mohave desert. Gerry Gero, assistant to Ray Berwick the bird trainer, has backed this view, while Hedren’s hairdresser, Virginia Darcy, is on record agreeing that the crew “were all looking out for her”. He also questions why Hitchcock would have risked disfiguring his new star during an expensive shoot. Taylor adds that onlookers, such as assistant director Jim Brown and Hitchcock’s assistant, Peggy Robertson, have never mentioned the limo incident when offering other criticisms of the director. “It also happened a few days after Hedren was offered the part of Marnie, which makes even less sense.” “Shooting documents show there was months of studio filming between the time when she was staying in that motel and the phone booth filming,” he told the Observer. After speaking to surviving members of the film crew on The Birds, Lee Moral believes the record should be set straight. The reputation of Britain’s greatest film director, fear Taylor and Lee Moral, is being tarnished by allegations that do not stand up. The film provoked protests from those who worked with Hitchcock when it was broadcast and these objections have intensified in response to Hedren’s new memoir. The allegation about Hitchcock’s attempted kiss came to light in 2008 in Donald Spoto’s book, Spellbound by Beauty, which inspired the 2012 television film The Girl, starring Sienna Miller as Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock. The glass booth’s supposedly shatterproof panes splintered, cutting her cheek, and Hedren suggests the sequence was part punishment for her rejection of him. ![]() She repelled his advances, she writes, and alleges he took his revenge the next day when they filmed the famous telephone booth scene in which birds break in to attack the star. Hedren, mother of 1980s film star Melanie Griffith and grandmother to Dakota Johnson, the star of last year’s Fifty Shades of Grey, claims that during location filming of The Birds, Hitchcock gave her a ride to her motel in his limousine and tried to kiss her while others watched. Taylor and a fellow Hitchcock expert, Tony Lee Moral, author of Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie and The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds, both argue that Hedren’s claims are not supported by others who worked on the films, or by the shooting schedules and other documents in Hitchcock’s archive at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. Taylor said that in previous interviews for his book, republished in paperback in January, Hedren said the director had taught her all she knew about films, even allowing her into script meetings for The Birds. She was a New York fashion model when he spotted her in October 1961 in a diet drink commercial. ![]() Hedren, the director’s archetypal cool screen blonde, also starred in another Hitchcock thriller, Marnie. She is, I would guess, elaborating memories she feels bitter about but, as Hitchcock’s friend, I resent the way her story has changed over the years.” John Russell Taylor, author of Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock, said: “In a way I don’t blame Hedren, who I got to know in the late 1970s when I was researching my book.
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