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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock is the main antagonist of the 2012 HBO/BBC biographical television movie The Girl, which was based on the true story of Alfred Hitchcock's alleged obsession with The Birds actress Tippi Hedren. He is based off the actual filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and his notoriously troubled production for the 1963 film The Birds.
He was portrayed by Toby Jones, who also played the Dream Lord in Doctor Who, Lanfranco Cassetti in Agatha Christie's Poirot, Arnim Zola in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Aristides Silk in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Culverton Smith in Sherlock and Gunnar Eversol in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Biography[]
In 1961, Hitchcock first notices Hedren in a television commercial for a diet drink. He wants to turn her into the next Grace Kelly, with whom he had worked extensively during the 1950s. Hedren passes her screen test and is groomed for the starring role in Hitchcock's latest film, The Birds. Captivated by Hedren's Nordic looks, Hitchcock becomes infatuated with her. While filming The Birds, he makes physical advances to her in the back of a limousine but she rebuffs him and escapes through the back door. In retaliation for her rejection, Hitchcock exposes Hedren to terrifying encounters with birds. A mechanical bird breaks the supposedly shatterproof glass of a telephone booth during filming, scratching Hedren's face with splintering glass.
After arriving on set to shoot a scene where Hedren's character (Melanie Daniels) is trapped in an attic with aggressive birds, she discovers that Hitchcock has ordered the mechanical birds to be replaced with live ones. He demands the scene be repeated until he is satisfied with Hedren's reaction. This takes a protracted several days of filming, leaving Hedren traumatized.
With The Birds being a box-office success, Hitchcock and Hedren begin work on Marnie. However, Hedren finds the film's content and Hitchcock's obsession with her mentally and emotionally exhausting, with the director frustrated by Hedren's coldness towards him. During a conversation with writer Evan Hunter, Hitchcock admits that he has erectile dysfunction and his only sexual partner is his wife. He later declares his love for Hedren; she walks away, leaving him frustrated and further rejected. Hitchcock refuses Hedren's request for time off to attend the Photoplay Awards in New York City (where she is nominated for the Most Promising Actress award), and tells her he will require her to make herself sexually available to him on demand if her career is to continue. Hedren quits working for Hitchcock after completing Marnie, but he refuses to release her from her contract; effectively preventing her from working for another production company, thus ending her Hollywood career.
Two notes before the titles inform the viewer that Hitchcock and Hedren never worked together again, and The Birds and Marnie are considered his last classic films.
Trivia[]
- Toby Jones was nominated for a Emmy, BAFTA TV Award, and a Golden Globe for his performance as Alfred Hitchcock.
- The widow of James H. Brown, Hitchcock's assistant on The Birds and Marnie, has insisted that the depiction of Hitchcock in this movie is inaccurate and that the information her husband gave to screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes in an interview before he died in 2011, was either ignored or distorted. His remarks to Hughes on the subject of Alfred Hitchcock had been, in reality, entirely admiring and complimentary.
- Ray Berwick, the bird trainer on The Birds, is depicted as having contempt for Hitchcock, even referring to him at one point as "the old fool". In reality, Berwick always spoke of Hitchcock with the utmost respect and affection, working with him again on Topaz.
- Timothy Spall was originally casted as Alfred Hitchcock.
- The late Sir Sean Connery and Louise Latham, who respectively played Tippi Hedren's husband and mother in Marnie, repeatedly told interviewers that they had seen nothing untoward in Hitchcock's behavior towards Hedren during shooting.
- Tippi Hedren was the guest on the late Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast #142 (2-13-17). When asked (around 24:25) how much of the portrayal of her relationship with Hitchcock was accurate, she replied that it was very accurate: the studio had to get her approval to do the movie about her, and she agreed on condition that she be involved in the writing. Her credit for the movie is a "Thanks".
- Rita Riggs, who worked on The Birds and Marnie, was interviewed by screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes before this movie was written, but subsequently claimed that her remarks were either entirely ignored or else falsified or distorted. She had been entirely complimentary about Hitchcock and insisted that his behavior towards Hedren had been entirely professional.
- One of two films about Hitchcock released in 2012. In this one, Hitchcock and his wife are played by Toby Jones and Imelda Staunton, who previously appeared together in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. In the film Hitchcock, they are played by Anthony Hopkins and Hellen Mirren, who previously appeared together in Red. The latter film also featured Scarlett Johansson, who appeared with Toby Jones in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Hopkins and Jones appeared together in The Rite. His father, Freddie Jones, appeared with Hopkins in The Elephant Man.
- Toby Jones's father, Freddie Jones, frequently worked with director David Lynch. This included appearing in Wild at Heart, opposite another frequent collaborator of Lynch's, actress Laura Dern. Her father, Bruce Dern, appeared in Marnie. He also appeared in The Elephant Man, opposite Anthony Hopkins, who played the title character in the film Hitchcock.
- Jones's role as Hitchcock required him to spend four hours each day being made up with prosthetic makeup and a fatsuit, and he did daily twenty-minute vocal exercises to imitate Hitchcock's distinctive speech. In interview with The Scotsman, Jones said that "Hitchcock's voice was so beautiful. There's something in the rhythm and roll of it that is connected to the way Hitchcock thinks and moves. Then there is everything he ingested – the cigar smoking and drinking that's imprinted on his voice. And everywhere he lived; you can hear cockney London, California, and a plummy received pronunciation in that voice".
- Hedren gave Spoto an account of the director as a sexual predator for his 1983 book, The Dark Side of a Genius. Spoto wrote that Hitchcock made "an overt sexual proposition that she could neither ignore nor answer casually". Hedren alleged in Spoto's 2009 book, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, that Hitchcock actually asked her to "make myself sexually available and accessible to him – however and whenever and wherever he wanted". Spoto was the first person Hedren told her story to. She said that "it was embarrassing and insulting - there were a lot of reasons why I didn't want to tell the story. I didn't want it to be taken advantage of, twisted, turned and made into an even uglier situation than it was. It wasn't until years later that I told Donald the story. (...) He is absolutely true and honest in this book". She previously said, in 1973, while Hitchcock was still alive, that a major life-style difference caused a split in their relationship: "He was too possessive and too demanding. I cannot be possessed by anyone. But, then, that's my own hangup".
- Hedren's account contrasted with the many interviews she gave about her time with Hitchcock, her presence at the AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony honoring him in 1979, and her presence at his funeral. When asked about it, Hedren answered: "He ruined my career, but he didn't ruin my life. That time of my life was over. I still admire the man for who he was".
- Other actresses have spoken about the close attention Hitchcock paid to details of the leading ladies' characters and appearances in his films, but they said that no harassment was involved. Eva Marie Saint, who starred in 1959's North by Northwest, told The Daily Telegraph that "Hitchcock was a gentleman, he was funny, he was so attentive to me, with the character, and he cared about everything my character Eve Kendall wore. He had an eye for the specifics of the character".
- Kim Novak, who worked on Hitchcock's 1957 film Vertigo, disputed the film's view of the director, but also stated: "I won't dispute Tippi if that's what she saw". Novak told The Daily Telegraph: "I feel bad about all the stuff people are saying about him now, that he was a weird character. I did not find him to be weird at all. I never saw him make a pass at anybody or act strange to anybody". Louise Latham, who played Hedren's mother in Marnie, dismissed claims of Hitchcock's predatory nature in Broadcast magazine: "I find some of the allegations hard to believe ... I wasn't aware of her being hassled on the set".
- Nora Brown (widow of James H. Brown, first assistant director on The Birds and Marnie, who knew Hitchcock for several years) said that her husband would not have endorsed The Girl's interpretation of events and the film's portrayal of Hitchcock would have saddened him. Gwyneth Hughes interviewed James Brown as part of her background research for the film, but he died before the film was completed. In October, Nora Brown told The Daily Telegraph that she had written to Hughes expressing her anger. Hughes has said that James H. Brown backed up Hedren's claims of sexual harassment. Tony Lee Moral, author of two books about the making of the Hitchcock films in which Hedren starred, echoed Brown's comments. Writing for Broadcast in December, Moral (who interviewed Jim Brown at length for his 2013 book, The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds) recalled a remark Brown made about Hitchcock: "Some of the things that are expressed about [Hitchcock] are highly over exaggerated. I think Hitch became upset because he thought Tippi wasn't fulfilling the star quality that he thought she had or was looking for".
- In a 2016 interview with Larry King, Hedren would contradict herself, by claiming that "[the sexual advances] didn't happen until we were almost finished with 'Marnie'", and when asked if any of such sexual advances happened during the filming of The Birds, she replied, "Never". Further on, she was asked if Hitchcock was "OK up until then" and "easy to work with", to which Hedren replied, "Yes, yes [...] It was a perfect situation".
- In an interview with FT Magazine's Rosie Millard, Hedren discussed Hitchcock's attitude towards her after she decided not to work for him again: "He did ruin my career. He kept me under contract, paid me to do nothing for close on two years". Hitchcock sold her contract to Universal Studios, which dismissed her when she refused to work on one of its television shows. However, her acting career continued and she appeared in a number of film and television productions. Hedren said that while she was still under contract to Hitchcock, he turned down several film roles on her behalf, and was particularly disappointed when she heard from French director François Truffaut that he had wanted her for his film Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut's daughter Laura disputed this, telling Tony Lee Moral her mother had expressed surprise at the mention of Hedren's possible involvement in the project. Laura Truffaut was also skeptical of the story: "It is extremely unlikely in my view that my father seriously entertained this project without sharing it with my mother as he was not secretive about the other actors who were considered for casting".
- The film's portrayal of Hitchcock as a sexual predator was criticized. On the day of its UK television premiere, David Millward of The Daily Telegraph quoted Eva Marie Saint, Doris Day and Kim Novak, who described their work relationship with Hitchcock as a positive one. Writing for savehitchcock.com (a website established in response to the media's portrayal of Hitchcock), John Russell Taylor – author of the 1978 biography Hitch – said the film is "totally absurd".
- In an interview with The Evening Standard in January 2013, Anthony Hopkins (who played the eponymous role in the 2012 Alfred Hitchcock biopic Hitchcock) questioned The Girl's portrayal of the director and the need for a film about that period of Hitchcock's career: "I talked to Tippi Hedren one day ... and she never mentioned that ... Whatever his obsession was, she didn't want to dwell on it ... I don't think it's necessary to put all that into a movie". Speaking to The Independent later that month, Hitchcock director Sacha Gervasi said, "[The Girl] seems a rare one-note portrayal of a man who was a little more complex than that. A lot of people, who were there, do not recognise this portrayal of him as this monster". Danny Huston, who played screenwriter Whitfield Cook in Hitchcock, told WENN.com that he believed Hitchcock would not have contested Hedren's account of him: "Hitchcock was such a deliciously dark character that I don't think he would dismiss what Tippi was saying as not true".
- Prior to the film's release, Hedren said in October that although she believed the film accurately portrays Hitchcock's behavior towards her, the time constraints of a 90-minute film prevented telling the entire story of her career with him. She told television critic Rob Salem: "It wasn't a constant barrage of harassment. If it had been constantly the way we have had to do it in this film, I would have been long gone".