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He was the Master of Suspense, knighted by the Queen and revered by the critics... Alfred Hitchcock has been hailed as one of the greatest film-makers of all time.

Yet to Tippi Hedren, the sexy blonde former model who starred in two of his best known movies, The Birds and Marnie, he was a creepy old pervert who made her life a living hell, on and off screen.

Now 82, Tippi has talked for the first time at length about the painful price she had to pay for stardom in the 1960s.

And she has passed details of her shocking experiences on to actress Sienna Miller, who is portraying her in a TV drama about her and Hitchcock.

Hitchcock developed an almost-crazed obsession for Tippi and when she rejected his advances he made her life a nightmare, bombarding her with crude sexual overtures, reciting filthy limericks to her and ruthlessly trying to control every aspect of her life.

“He was evil and deviant, almost to the point of being dangerous,” she says.

“To be the object of someone’s obsession is horrible. It was a form of stalking.

"He had my handwriting analysed, he had me followed and it was as if I was being engulfed by him.

"He tried to control what I ate, what I wore and how I lived.

“I had to get out of there,” she recalls.

(Image: David Montgomery/Getty Images)

“I was dealing with one of the most powerful men in motion pictures and it was difficult, embarrassing and insulting.

"He said, ‘If you leave, I’ll ruin your career.’ And he did.”

Now her ordeal has been recreated by Sienna Miller for a 90-minute BBC2 TV drama, The Girl, which also stars Toby Jones as Hitchcock, with Imelda Staunton as Hitchcock’s wife Alma, and ­Penelope Wilton as his loyal assistant Peggy Robertson.

“Alma was an enigma to everyone,” Tippi says. “Nobody could understand what their relationship was. At one point she came up to me and said, ‘Tippi, I’m so sorry you have to go through this.’

“I looked at her and said, ‘But you could stop it,’ and she just kind of glazed over, turned and walked away.

“But it was nothing new in Hollywood and there was nothing you could do. There were no laws against it then but if it had happened now I’d be a very rich woman because of sexual harassment laws.”

Tippi, now running Shambala, an 80-acre game reserve she founded on the edge of the Mojave Desert, is talking in Los Angeles about the nightmare she went through working for Hitchcock.

Three times married and divorced, and the mother of actress Melanie Griffith, Tippi is still coolly elegant and self-assured, talking matter-of-factly and seemingly without rancour of the mental and physical torture inflicted on her.

Hitchcock had finished Psycho and was preparing to film The Birds in 1963 when he saw Tippi in a soft drink commercial on TV. He ordered his aides to find “that girl” and bring her to him.

She was one of a long line of icy blondes, including Joan Fontaine, Madeleine Carroll, Vera Miles, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak, with whom Hitchcock had become fixated during his stellar 40-year career.

He put Tippi under contract and promised to make her a star, which he did. But the divorced actress, whose daughter Melanie was then four years old, was horrified when he made crude sexual advances to her.

One of her worst weeks working with Hitchcock was on the set of The Birds, for a scene in which she was supposed to go up the stairs to an attic where she was attacked by flocks of birds.

In every other scene mechanical birds had been used and she had been told the same ones would be used in the attic.

“But everybody had lied and on the morning that we were going to start the scene, the assistant director came in and looked at the walls and the ceiling then blurted out: ‘The mechanical birds don’t work so we have to use real ones,’ and then he ran out.

“When I got to the set I found out there had never been any intention to use mechanical birds because a cage had been built around the door I was supposed to come in and there were boxes of the ravens, gulls and pigeons that bird trainers wearing gauntlets up to their shoulders hurled at me, one after the other, for a week.

"There were breaks in between but Hitchcock didn’t stay around during them. He went off into this office and as the days went by it just got worse and worse.”

Pecked, bloodied and exhausted, Tippi finally collapsed, crying hysterically and had to be carried off the set and put under the care of a doctor who ordered her to rest for a week.

“Hitchcock said, ‘She can’t rest for a week, we have nobody else to film’,” she says.

“And the doctor said: ‘What are you trying to do? Kill her?’”

Tippi stoically endured Hitchcock’s behaviour until filming wrapped on Marnie in 1964 and she was nominated for the Photoplay Award as Most Promising Actress.

Hitchcock, who was knighted in 1979, shortly before his death the following year, refused to let her go to New York to accept the award and her repressed anger and resentment finally exploded.

She called him “a pig” and demanded to be released from her contract.

From then on he only spoke to her through intermediaries and never uttered her name, referring to her only as “the girl”.

“For two more years he kept me under contract, paying me $600 [£380] a week,” she says.

“Because of The Birds and Marnie I was, as the expression goes, hot in Hollywood and producers and directors wanted to hire me.

"But they had to go through him to get to me and all he said was, ‘She isn’t available’.

“It was so easy for him. There was talk of me receiving an Academy Award nomination but he stopped that.”

When she could finally work again Charlie Chaplin cast her with Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando in the ill-fated A Countess from Hong Kong, in 1967, but soon after that the roles became more sporadic and she concentrated on Shambala, which houses some 70 animals including African lions, Siberian and Bengal tigers, leopards and mountain lions.

As a consultant to the new TV drama, Tippi invited Sienna to visit her in California to discuss her role.

“I wanted to make sure she understood where I was coming from and where I got the strength to deal with it,” she says. “He was so insistent and obsessive but I was an extremely strong young woman. There was no way he was going to get the better of me.

“I talked to Sienna about my upbringing and the moral education given to me.

“I kept saying to her, ‘Make sure you make me look strong in this movie because otherwise it would not be true.

“I got over Hitchcock a long time ago because I wasn’t going to allow my life to be ruined by it,” she says.

“It was like I was in a mental prison but now it has no effect on me. I did what I had to do to deal with it.”