‘I wasn’t interested in being an actress’

‘We never had a big cat living in our house with us,” Tippi Hedren tells me. “That would be insanity!” Hedren is not referring to oversized house cats. She means, as she puts it, “exotic felines”, of the kind she was pictured with by Time magazine in the Seventies. The sequence of photographs – one of which appears on the cover of this issue – resembled out-takes from a family album. Here’s Neil the lion dozing on the living room carpet while Hedren, famous then, as now, for her performance in Hitchcock’s The Birds, leans against him reading the paper. There’s Neil sharing a bed with her daughter, soon to become the actress Melanie Griffith.

But Hedren tells me that it was all an act. “That was not a pet lion,” she clarifies. “Those were publicity photographs.” Even so, when you live as Hedren does on a sanctuary in California that is also home to 29 wild cats, and you once spent ten years working on a film now said to be the most dangerous ever made, “insanity” is relative.

I first spoke to Hedren over the telephone early this year. Now 86, she still acts, both in cult films ( Citizen Ruth, I Heart Huckabees) and TV series ( Cougartown), and is a Hollywood matriarch with a peerless line of descendants. It’s perhaps no accident that her wonderfully wispy-voiced daughter should have been cast as the reckless lead in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild. Nor should it have come as a surprise when her granddaughter, Griffith’s daughter Dakota Johnson, became a star last year in Fifty Shades of Grey.

“Isn’t it awesome?” Hedren said, when I asked her about the fact that acting had become a family tradition. “And I didn’t push for it, ever. I came home one day and Melanie said: ‘Mom, I’ve got a job’.” At the time of our call, Hedren was due to speak at the Hay Festival and had agreed to do an interview in advance, though not in person.

When I rang, she was suffering from one of her chronic headaches. Would she rather I called back another time, I asked. After all, we had several months to play with. “Oh that would be wonderful. Yes. Oh, thank you so much,” she said. Even in those few words I felt I had entered a time-warp: she had the tone and grace of a world gone by, and the telephone made it all the more emphatic. There was no reason to think of her as old, since I couldn’t see her. Instead, it was as though studio-era Hollywood had been resurrected: Hedren became an actress in the early Sixties, but she always had more of a Forties persona.

When I rang back a few weeks later, her headache was continuing to plague her, and later on, even after she’d been to hospital, there was still no cure. “Maybe a lobotomy,” she said, laughing. “That might work.” Hedren cancelled her trip to Hay. But by then we had spoken a number of times. “You’re fun to talk to,” she’d say, and ask me to call back once more. She was, it turned out, in the process of writing her memoirs, and she was in the mood for reminiscence.

InMarnie, the second film Hedren made with Alfred Hitchcock, in 1964, a businessman with mysterious intentions (played by Sean Connery) asks his new secretary (Hedren) to work overtime, and shows her a photograph of a wild cat he keeps as a pet. “That’s Sophie,” he tells her. “She’s a jaguarundi. I trained her… to trust me.”

What does Tippi Hedren think of Hitchcock? Not much, learns Gaby Wood, she’s got bigger beasts to worry about