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Was Alfred Hitchcock a vindictive sexual predator? Fans say he is being unfairly smeared by a West End play about his 'harassment' of The Birds star Tippi Hedren. TOM LEONARD investigates...
Alfred Hitchcock liked to control everything about the blonde ice maidens he put in his films. He told them how to behave, how to dress and even what to eat and drink.
The East End greengrocer’s son loved to inflict the most brutal cruelties on women in his movies — stabbed to death in the shower in Psycho, strangled in Strangers On A Train, and raped in Marnie — but the question of whether this reflected his own deep-rooted misogyny and predatory nature has long divided Hitchcock experts. While aspects of Hedren’s account of Hitchcock’s behaviour — his alternating fawning and bullying, and his sexual boorishness — have been echoed by other women since he died aged 80 in 1980, some biographers and collaborators, including production team members on The Birds, have challenged her version of events and her insistence that he ruined her career as revenge for spurning him. ‘Socially awkward, self-absorbed, and sexually frustrated, Hitchcock made passes at and assaults on young women because he failed to control his urges, but also because in the environment he inhabited, men of his standing were afforded licence to behave in that way,’ said Edward White, author of an acclaimed 2021 biography.
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