Sienna Miller says ‘an army of women’ would fight Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘sadistic’ abuse today

Tippi Hedren accused Hitchcock of being obsessed with her, assaulting her and attempting to destroy her career

Sienna Miller has said that Alfred Hitchcock’s “sadistic” abuse of the actor Tippi Hedren would never be allowed today.

Miller played Hedren in The Girl, a 2012 film revolving around the making of Hitchcock’s The Birds. It explored Hitchcock’s infatuation with Hedren, who he had discovered as a model and brought to Hollywood, and the trauma the filmmaker enacted on his star when she rebuffed his advances.

Speaking at the Montclair Film Festival, Miller said that “an army of women” would today fight filmmakers who exhibited behaviour like Hitchcock’s.

“That was a really, really traumatising, appalling experience for [Hedren],” Miller said. “And not only how he treated her in the making of those films but in the aftermath. He kept her under contract. He wouldn’t release her to work with Godard and Truffaut, who were all trying to hire her, but just kept her for 10 years under this contract and watched her grow old, without making anything. It was very sadistic.”

She continued: “Thankfully I think the world has changed enough where if anybody even attempted that kind of abuse, there is an army of women that would come out and fight it. And I feel very fortunate to be working in these times, because I think that story is not uncommon of that era. You really belonged to the studio that you were assigned to and, essentially, to the director.”

In 2012, Hedren claimed that she was “the object of [Hitchcock’s] obsession” during the making of The Birds and his follow-up Marnie.

She also claimed that Hitchcock led her to physical harm on the set of The Birds after he substituted mechanical birds for real pigeons and ravens for an attack scene at the last minute.

Sienna Miller in early 2020, and Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren on the set of ‘The Birds' (Jamie McCarthy/Getty/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock)

In her 2016 autobiography, Hedren alleged that Hitchcock sexually assaulted her and expressed jealousy when she spoke to other men. She also claimed that he deliberately harmed her reputation in Hollywood, and refused to allow her to work with other directors while she was under contract to him.

Miller was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in The Girl, which also starred Toby Jones as Hitchcock.