MORE THAN 40 years after he made her famous, Tippi Hedren, perhaps the ultimate Hitchcock blonde, hasn’t forgotten a detail about her relationship with the genius who, having failed to cage her, destroyed her career. “Hitch giveth and Hitch taketh away,” is how she sums it up.

I am no less likely to forget this encounter with her — and only partly because it takes place on a big-cat sanctuary. On the Shambala reserve where she lives, an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, reside lions, tigers and the breeds’ miscegenated offspring: ligers and tigons. The 70-odd beasts have been rescued by her charity from private zoos, dodgy circuses and numbskull private owners who belatedly discover that a tiger doesn’t make such a good children’s pet. As I am led from pound to pound, I feel as if I’m an expendable bit-part player in the first reel of a horror film and that in reel two the cats escape. But I am thinking inferior Spielberg and I need to be thinking superior Hitchcock.

Once we start talking, it is not so hard. Everything about the demeanour and still-svelte appearance of Hedren, who is 75, recalls the final age of drop-dead Hollywood glamour that Hitchcock exploited and subverted. The star of his masterpiece, The Birds, and of his strange misfire, Marnie, belongs to an epoch between Hollywood Babylon and Heat magazine, an era in which leading ladies really did possess grandeur and mystique. When taking her picture in the grounds, Bill Dow, Shambala’s tame photographer, coos through the lens that she’s a “goddess”, Hedren snaps: “Don’t you ever forget it.” I call her Miss Hedren throughout. In case the goddess bites.

It was in October 1961 that the 62-year-old Alfred Hitchcock spotted her flicking her mane on a TV commercial for a diet drink. She was a 31-year-old single mother, divorced from her wayward husband, a property agent named Peter Griffith. For her daughter’s sake, she had migrated from New York to more verdant Los Angeles but now, with Melanie Griffith (whose stardom would eventually eclipse her mother’s) already four, she was finding her career as a model faltering. She had no great expectations when the MCA talent agency phoned her one Thursday to ask for her show reels and photo book. She was recalled after the weekend and, on the Tuesday, an agent summoned her. She still had no idea who had shown an interest in her.

“And he finally said ‘You want to know who this person is?’ I said, ‘Oh, that would be nice.’ And he said, ‘Alfred Hitchcock wants to sign you to a contract.’ Not ‘wants to see you’. ‘Wants to sign you to a contract’.”

The contract, which was for seven years, matched but did not exceed her unspectacular income as a model. “So we went over to meet him and he was looking very pleased with himself, arms folded in front of him, and we talked about food, we talked about wines, we talked about travelling — everything but movies.”

Some $25,000 worth of colour screen tests followed, with Hedren, coached by Hitchcock and his wife, Alma, re-enacting scenes from previous Hitchcock movies at their home in Bel-Air. Three months later she was invited to join them and Lou Wasserman, head of Universal, at Chasen’s restaurant in Los Angeles.

“Hitch placed a very, very beautifully wrapped package in front of me from Gump [an upmarket store] in San Francisco and I opened it and it was a very beautiful pin of seed pearls and gold of three birds in flight.

“He said, ‘We want you to play Melanie Daniels in The Birds.’ Well, I was so stunned. I just all welled up, got tears in my eyes, and I looked over at Alma and she had tears in her eyes and Lou Wasserman had one tear in his and Alfred Hitchcock sat looking very pompous and thrilled with himself.”

Because he’d staged a scene? “Absolutely, he had.”

The Birds, taken from Daphne du Maurier’s short story, tells the fable of how Melanie, a feisty heiress and experienced practical joker from San Francisco, turns up in the small fishing town of Bodega Bay in pursuit of an eligible bachelor, only to find that its avian residents are turning on its citizens. It remains a terrifying film. Far from dating, the special effects seem fresh and real. This, Hedren suggests, is mainly because in those distant days before computer graphics Hitchcock hardly used technical trickery. The cast of extras comprised real birds. “And they were more worried about the birds,” she says, “ than they were about me.”

The picture’s devastating emotional climax comes as Hedren and her boyfriend’s family lie besieged in their boarded-up home. While the household sleeps, Melanie creeps upstairs to an attic bedroom. Like Pandora, she opens it, whereupon she is attacked by hundreds of ravens. It is, she concurs, an almost gratuitous scene.

“I said, ‘Hitch, you know I’m not a Method actress but I need motivation for this. Why is she doing this?’ And he said, ‘Because I tell you to’.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The super cool Vampire Weekend
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes