HBO's The Girl: Was Alfred Hitchcock an 'evil' sexual deviant?

An upcoming HBO movie paints the director as abusive and vindictive towards his leading ladies, an account that Tippi Hedren — star of The Birds — corroborates

Tippi Hedren
(Image credit: Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP)

Tippi Hedren — one of "Hitchcock's Blondes," along with Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, and Grace Kelly — spoke at a panel last week about an upcoming HBO film titled The Girl, which chronicles Hedren's fraught working relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock. She didn't have nice things to say. Hedren, now 82, claims that when she worked with Hitchcock on The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), the director revealed a decidedly unsavory streak. Here, a concise guide to the auteur's purported on-set issues:

What are Hedren's accusations against Hitchcock?

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Frances is a senior editor at TheWeek.com, managing the website on the early morning shift and editing stories on everything from politics to entertainment to science and tech. She's a graduate of Yale and the University of Missouri journalism school, and has previously worked at TIME and Real Simple. You can follow her on Twitter and on Tumblr.