Tippi Hedren is at her best when something is being taken from her. She starts The Birds as a surface and ends it as a person, and the two films she made with Hitchcock are nearly the whole of what there is to judge.
Fi1m perspective
The suit is pale green, and Edith Head gave her only the one. Melanie Daniels wears it to Bodega Bay, and for the first half hour of The Birds (1963) it is immaculate, and so is she: the hair set, the cigarette held just so. Hedren had been a fashion model, and Hitchcock, who found her in a television commercial, used that. Melanie is all poise and no interior in those early scenes, and we suspect Hitchcock wanted it that way, because a surface that perfect is there to be broken.
The breaking is where she is good. Hitchcock trained her in movement and posture and allowed her almost no improvisation, and you can see the drilling in the way she handles a cigarette or a martini glass, every gesture placed. But the moment in The Birds that stays with us has no gesture in it. A mother in the town diner tells Melanie she is the cause of all this, and Hedren, who has had an answer for everyone, has none, and the camera stays on her while nobody speaks up. We found it harder to watch than any beak, because the composure simply stops and what is left is a frightened woman a long way from home.
She made one more film with Hitchcock, Marnie (1964), playing a thief whose facade the story slowly unpicks, and then no more. Notices at the time found the character hard to warm to; later writers have been kinder, and it is now often counted among the strongest performances in his films. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, beyond noting that it asked her for the same thing The Birds did, a front with something behind it, and that she has described her own approach plainly: "I consider my acting, while not necessarily being method acting, but one that draws upon my own feelings." After that the parts thinned out. A supporting role in Chaplin's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), alongside Brando and Loren; then a long gap while she produced and starred in Roar (1981), a wildlife adventure directed by Noel Marshall with her daughter Melanie Griffith in the cast; then smaller roles, Pacific Heights (1990), I Heart Huckabees (2004), television, on into the 2000s.
What works is the gap between the drilled exterior and whatever is going on behind it, and it works because Hitchcock, Robert Burks and Edith Head arranged the frame so the exterior carried all the information until it failed. What does not work is the exterior on its own. The early Melanie is thin, and the first reviews that called her too fashionable to take seriously were not wrong about those scenes; they were wrong about what came next, because she gets better as the film takes more from her. Watch The Birds for its second hour, when the suit is torn and the woman inside it is finally visible. Then find Marnie, because the career is those two pictures and a long afterwards.
Biography
Tippi Hedren is an American actress. Born Nathalie Kay Hedren on 19 January 1930 in New Ulm, Minnesota, she began her career as a fashion model before making her feature film debut as Melanie Daniels in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). She next starred as the title character in Hitchcock's Marnie (1964).
Hedren founded the Roar Foundation in 1983 to support the Shambala Preserve, an animal sanctuary for big cats in California. She is the mother of actress Melanie Griffith.
