Cinema historians, former cast and crew and Alfred Hitchcock’s official biographer have rushed to the defence of the director after claims that he sexually harassed and bullied actress Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds in the 1960s.

In her new book, Tippi: A Memoir, published on 17 November, Hedren alleges that the director made sexual approaches to her and regarded her as his personal property. In one passage she also describes her genuine horror during the filming of the attic scene in The Birds when she was attacked by real birds. “It was ugly, brutal and relentless,” she writes, adding that Cary Grant, visiting the set that week, had told her how brave she was.

John Russell Taylor, author of Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock, said: “In a way I don’t blame Hedren, who I got to know in the late 1970s when I was researching my book. She is, I would guess, elaborating memories she feels bitter about but, as Hitchcock’s friend, I resent the way her story has changed over the years.”

Hedren, the director’s archetypal cool screen blonde, also starred in another Hitchcock thriller, Marnie. She was a New York fashion model when he spotted her in October 1961 in a diet drink commercial. Taylor said that in previous interviews for his book, republished in paperback in January, Hedren said the director had taught her all she knew about films, even allowing her into script meetings for The Birds.

Taylor and a fellow Hitchcock expert, Tony Lee Moral, author of Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie and The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds, both argue that Hedren’s claims are not supported by others who worked on the films, or by the shooting schedules and other documents in Hitchcock’s archive at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles.

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Hedren, mother of 1980s film star Melanie Griffith and grandmother to Dakota Johnson, the star of last year’s Fifty Shades of Grey, claims that during location filming of The Birds, Hitchcock gave her a ride to her motel in his limousine and tried to kiss her while others watched.

She repelled his advances, she writes, and alleges he took his revenge the next day when they filmed the famous telephone booth scene in which birds break in to attack the star. The glass booth’s supposedly shatterproof panes splintered, cutting her cheek, and Hedren suggests the sequence was part punishment for her rejection of him.

The allegation about Hitchcock’s attempted kiss came to light in 2008 in Donald Spoto’s book, Spellbound by Beauty, which inspired the 2012 television film The Girl, starring Sienna Miller as Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock.

The film provoked protests from those who worked with Hitchcock when it was broadcast and these objections have intensified in response to Hedren’s new memoir. The reputation of Britain’s greatest film director, fear Taylor and Lee Moral, is being tarnished by allegations that do not stand up. After speaking to surviving members of the film crew on The Birds, Lee Moral believes the record should be set straight. “Shooting documents show there was months of studio filming between the time when she was staying in that motel and the phone booth filming,” he told the Observer. “It also happened a few days after Hedren was offered the part of Marnie, which makes even less sense.”

Taylor adds that onlookers, such as assistant director Jim Brown and Hitchcock’s assistant, Peggy Robertson, have never mentioned the limo incident when offering other criticisms of the director. He also questions why Hitchcock would have risked disfiguring his new star during an expensive shoot.

Gerry Gero, assistant to Ray Berwick the bird trainer, has backed this view, while Hedren’s hairdresser, Virginia Darcy, is on record agreeing that the crew “were all looking out for her”.

Only two chapters in the new memoir are about Hitchcock, who died in 1980, as most of the book chronicles Hedren’s passion for filming with lions and other big cats and the creation of her wildlife reserve near the Mohave desert.

The biggest row between director and his star, all parties agree, was over Hedren’s plan to attend an awards event in New York held by Photoplay Magazine in February 1964, during the filming of Marnie, an intense pyschological thriller about abuse co-starring Sean Connery. Hedren’s memoir maintains she requested a long weekend away, but Lee Moral claims the records in the Los Angeles library show the awards evening was held in the middle of a week of scheduled filming.

A memo from Universal publicity manager David Golding sent in January advised Hitchcock that it was impractical for Hedren to fly to New York. Connery was scheduled to begin filming as Bond in Goldfinger in March and there was no room for postponements. Hitchcock also did not want Hedren to break the taut atmosphere on the Marnie set.

Louise Latham, who played Marnie’s mother, told Lee Moral she had sympathy for Hitchcock. “I find some of the allegations hard to believe. She’s a lovely woman, but I don’t think Tippi should have said those things about Hitch … I wasn’t aware of her being hassled on the set. For Hitchcock to go down as this monstrous thing, to the degree that [Tippi] was vulnerable is not accurate.”

Taylor told the Observer he once asked Hitchcock about the row and was told that Hedren had said something no one was permitted to say: “Well, she, ahem, referred to my weight.” Robertson later told him Hedren had shouted: “You fat pig. Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do!”