Trivia of Tippi Hedren

Trivia of Tippi Hedren (19 January 1930)

*She was a Minnesota girl.On reaching her 20th birthday, Hedren bought a ticket to New York City, where she joined the Eileen Ford Agency. Within a year, she made her unofficial film debut as "Miss Ice Box" in the musical comedy The Petty Girl (1950) starring Robert Cummings.

*Her first television commercial was for a cigarette brand in the early 1950s. She learned to smoke for the commercial, because she felt viewers would know if she was faking this. Her smoking habit lasted for 15 years until her daughter, Melanie Griffith--then 10 years old--came to her after a school health lecture and begged her to stop. In her 2016 memoir, she wrote that her primary reason for quitting was because smoking ages one's physical appearance.

*Alfred Hitchcock saw her in a 1961 commercial aired during the Today (1952) show and cast her in The Birds (1963). In the commercial for a diet drink, she is seen walking down a street and a man whistles at her slim, attractive figure, and she turns her head with an acknowledging smile. In the opening scene of The Birds (1963), the same thing happens as she walks toward the bird shop. This was an inside joke by Hitchcock.

*Of all her films, Marnie (1964) continues to be her favorite, because of the complex title character. This is even more telling, considering all the problems that reportedly took place during the filming, which spelled the end of her professional relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the mixed critical reception and the indifferent box-office results upon the film's release.

*She was supposed to play the leads in Bedtime Story (1964) (opposite David Niven and Marlon Brando), Mirage (1965) (opposite Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau), and Fahrenheit 451 (1966) (opposite Oskar Werner), but Hitchcock told the directors and producers that she wasn't available to work with them.

*Is a huge fan of Johnny Depp and named one of her house cats after him. Even though she hasn't met him, her then son-in-law Antonio Banderas acted with him in Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), and her granddaughter Dakota Johnson appeared in two films with him, 21 Jump Street (2012) and Black Mass (2015).

*Responding to a fan inquiry, she commented on Facebook in May 2017 that she's still in touch with Sean Connery. In December 2017, in a joint interview with her daughter Melanie Griffith, granddaughter Dakota and Dakota's father Don Johnson, "The Hollywood Reporter" publication asked her who her first celebrity crush was, and she replied, "Sean Connery".