The camera zooms in on a beautiful blonde woman asleep on the lawn. You can pick out livid scars on her eyelids, cheek, neck and hands. As her three-year-old daughter gleefully runs out and jogs her mother awake, the woman sits bolt upright. She starts shrieking and frantically scrabbling in the air as if she is fighting off a flock of imaginary angry birds. She does this for several seconds before falling sobbing into her daughter’s arms and hugging her so tightly that she knocks the young girl’s boater off. This is what Alfred Hitchcock did to Tippi Hedren.
Hitchcock’s films were cruel, but his behaviour behind the scenes was even crueller. In this crucial scene from The Girl, an absorbing new one-off BBC2 drama, Hedren, played by Sienna Miller, is re-living the horror of a scene she has just filmed for The Birds, Hitchcock’s deeply disquieting vision of a world in which previously friendly birds turn into terrifying assailants.
For the climactic sequence of the movie, in which Hedren’s character Melanie is attacked in an attic by a ravenous flock of starlings, the 62-year-old director (Toby Jones) had promised his jittery star, a naive former model, making her major acting debut and already highly unsettled by various close avian encounters, that he would only use mechanical birds in a very brief sequence. In the event, Hedren arrived at the studio to find several cages full of furious starlings which were duly unleashed. They were then chained to her body and hurled at her by heartless crewmembers over not a couple of hours, but five full days. They pecked at her face relentlessly, leaving her covered in scars.