The new play “Double Feature” about the working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren has premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London and is already perpetuating the myth about the famous director and his protege.
While scriptwriter John Logan in The Times says he believes Hedren’s story that Hitchcock assaulted her, many of the cast and crew interviewed deny the veracity of the allegations, especially physical abuse. You can read many of their interviews on this site and in Tony Lee Moral’s books The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds and Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie.
Hitchcock did believe that actresses under contract should be committed to their craft which may be an old school way of thinking under the studio system, but cast and crew deny witnessing any physical abuse during the filming of The Birds and Marnie. All due care was given to Hedren during the filming of The Birds according to bird handler Gero Gerry, hairdresser Virginia Darcy and wardrobe mistress Rita Riggs.
The myths were also perpetuated by Donald Spoto, biographer of The Dark Side of Genius, whose research and motivations have come into question, not only in his biography on Hitch, but also James Dean, Audrey Hepburn and others.
Official Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor who knew both Hitchcock and Hedren in the 1970s, describes the allegations and dramatisations as “a tissue of melodramatic invention”.
It also just been reported that Tippi Hedren, 94, is battling dementia according to Spanish Media Reports. Apparently Tippi can’t remember her career.
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save hitchcock 
She never remembered it correctly when she didn’t have dementia, so no big loss there.
I am baffled to see that John Logan is the writer of that play called “Double Feature”. As he is the screenwriter for the Michael Jackson biopic “Michael”, which will confront — among many topics — the allegations that the King of Pop experienced during his life, I find Logan’s behavior hypocritical. As the King of Pop was proven innocent in a Court of Law and all his accusers have been exposed in the medias and in Court as liars and scumbags with despicable histories, I find Logan’s behavior toward Hitchcock horrible as it contradicts the principle of due process that Michael experienced. In his life, Michael went through those trials and proved his innocence; even then there are still liars who have tried to attack his name today and he can’t defend himself. And yet, Mr. Logan is doing just that with Alfred Hitchcock, participating in an attack toward a director who cannot defend himself. He may have written a good script for the MJ biopic and other projects with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, but his work on such a play is outrageous. Toward Hitchcock, his treatment of that man is simply shameful, especially as Tippi Hedren has completely exaggerated and changed her story over the years, adding stuff that does not make any sense and which has been contradicted and debunked by many people on the set, including her former colleagues who denounced her stories as becoming over-the-top through the years. As she has been apparently diagnosed with dementia, I sometimes wonder if that condition was something that she had been struggling since a long time and if it did not fuel some of her distorted and exaggerated visions of Alfred Hitchcock. Because the more you hear about her and some of the stuff in her family, the more you notice how there is something not quite right in that family group. Overall, although her performance in the Birds was very good (unlike Marnie where she was mediocre), her behaviour toward Hitchcock is shameful and closer to the resentful grudges of a B-Actress who expected a bigger career and success with Hitchcock, but never got it and so she resents him; attacking him only when he is dead and cannot defend himself.
I am so sorry for Alfred Hitchcock who deserves better respect. At least his colleagues and female actresses have been there to support him. They at least help us realize how Tippi Hedren’s claims enter in conflict with everybody else’s and how they are unreliable.