Did He Really Treat Actors Like Cattle?
By Ron Miller
Back in 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock kindly submitted to an interview
by me when I still was a college boy, it was only natural for
me to ask him if he really once said 
actors were like cattle.
"No," he told me with a bemused smile, "what I said was that actors should be treated like cattle."
Obviously, I wasn't the first nor would I be the last to ask him if he really meant that famous quote attributed to him. Never has a quote haunted a reputation like that one did Hitchcock. It keeps coming back time and again, especially after the negative publicity about Hitchcock's allegedly kinky attitude toward his leading ladies, generated in recent years by some dirt-dealing biographers.
At the time, Hitchcock seemed amused by the notion of himself as some kind of Hollywood steer-wrangler, prodding the lowly actors through the paces he wanted them to take, so his movie would turn out his way, not theirs.
Many people still believe Hitchcock must have been an awful director to work for because he was bound to stifle an actor's creativity. Everybody knows he meticulously storyboarded his films in advance, sketching each camera angle on paper, controlling everything, including the footage that went to the film editors.
And some of the actors he worked with in
his later years have made some disparaging remarks about his
controlling nature, feeding the rumor that he directed with an
electric cattle prod in one hand and a whip in the other. Tippi
Hedren ("The Birds," "Marnie") is often quoted
saying critical things about the way Hitchcock controlled her
career when she was under exclusive contract to him.
Another actor who personally told me such things about Hitchcock
was William Devane. In an interview in the late 1970s, Devane
told me Hitchcock "tormented" his 
co-star, Karen Black, while they were
making what turned out to be Hitchcock's final film, "Family
Plot" (1976). Devane wasn't too keen on Hitchcock either,
for his own reasons.
But I'm now convinced that almost all the actors who worked with Hitchcock really liked him and enjoyed the experience. Karen Black, for instance, told me Devane's story about Hitchcock tormenting her wasn't true.
"I thought he was a very warm man," she told me in 1997. "I just loved him. I thought he was very fatherly."
Over the years, I guess I've talked with at least two dozen actors who made pictures with the master of suspense. Invariably, I asked them about Hitch. Almost without exception, they warmed to the subject immediately.
When I met Ingrid Bergman backstage at a London theater in the late 1970s, the conversation naturally came around to Hitchcock, for whom she made two of his best films: "Notorious" and "Spellbound," as well as the one many think of as his worst: "Under Capricorn." She made it clear she simply adored the man - and confirmed she had been a guest many times at his country retreat in Scotts Valley, CA, something Hitchcock himself had told me with great pride.
Many years later, I asked Maureen O'Hara about working with Hitchcock, not expecting much since they only made one picture together, "Jamaica Inn," way back in 1939 before Hitchcock moved from England to America. Her eyes lit up and she gave me one of her fabulously radiant Irish smiles.
"He was a magnificent director," O'Hara said, "and so kind. He was half-Irish, you know. I was pretty young and it was my first big picture. He taught me how to use breath - when to hold it in, when to let it out - for dramatic purposes."
O'Hara was very young then, playing the daughter of villainous innkeeper Charles Laughton in the first screen adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier's novel. It's revealing to learn Hitchcock took the time to teach her anything, which certainly conflicts with his image as a director not much given to coaching his actors.
O'Hara also has warm memories of the atmosphere on the set of "Jamaica Inn," where her best pal was Hitchcock's young daughter, Patricia.
"The biggest thrill for us was to get a ride on the camera dolly," O'Hara recalled, "so, the crew would give us a ride across the stage and back again."
Doesn't sound like a tyrant was in charge, does it?
Janet Leigh, who succumbed to "Mrs.
Bates" in that immortal shower scene in "Psycho,"
says Hitchcock was a bon vivant on the set - and kept everybody
amused 
with
hilarious stories. In fact, she recalled in 1997, he had her
convulsed with laughter just before she went into that shower
scene.
"The ambience on the set was extraordinary," says Leigh. "He was extraordinary."
Many assume that "method" actors with Actors' Studio-style training would have hated working for Hitchcock because he expected them to do what was in the script and not go looking for motivation. Yet I'll take the word of Oscar-winner Karl Malden, a veteran of the Group Theater and the films of Elia Kazan, who made "I Confess" for Hitchcock in 1953 and had nothing but praise for him.
"Hitch rehearsed a scene until it was right," Malden told me in 1993, letting the air out of yet another myth about Hitchcock's style with actors.
Though Tippi Hedren has said some uncomplimentary things about Hitchcock from time to time, she had plenty of respect for him, too, and in a long interview with me in 1994, acknowledged that, "He was not only my director; he was also my drama coach."
Hedren was paid very little while Hitch had her under contract, but she also was a virtual unknown when he cast her in "The Birds" and made her a star overnight. Her primary complaint: Hitchcock wanted to control every aspect of her life, becoming obsessed with her.
"It's a very miserable situation to be the object of someone's obsession," Hedren told me. "It's very confining, very frightening - and I didn't like it."
In her second film with Hitchcock, "Marnie" (1964), Hedren felt the character Sean Connery played was very much like Hitchcock in psychological terms because, "He wanted control over this woman."
In retrospect, Hedren feels Hitchcock was "a very psychological director. He wanted to find out all the things that would push your button, that would upset you, embarrass you or make you happy. Then he would apply this to his direction of you."
Hedren eventually refused to star in a third Hitchcock film, "Mary Rose," which the director never made. She feels he punished her for that show of independence.
"He said he would ruin my career - and he did," she told me.
The late Anthony Perkins might be a good example of exactly the opposite effect. If Hitchcock hadn't cast Perkins as Norman Bates in "Psycho," the actor's movie career, then somewhat on the wane, might never have regained its momentum.
"He delighted in changing his plans," Perkins said of Hitchcock when I interviewed him a decade ago.
Perkins rejected the idea that Hitch always planned every shot in his films so carefully that he didn't like to do anything spontaneous once shooting started. He also nixed the notion that Hitchcock told actors what to do and wouldn't tolerate independence.
"He was one of the most collaborative directors I've ever worked with," Perkins told me. "Maybe that was because he'd just had it up to here with hearing what a dictator and autocrat he was. Maybe he just wanted somebody to outlive him and someday tell other people he wasn't that way at all."
Yet another perspective came from Oscar-winner Eva Marie Saint, who played the female lead in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" (1959). Saint came from the school of acting where motivation for action was crucial to understanding your character.
"Alfred Hitchcock didn't talk about the character," she recalled in an interview I had with her in 1990. "But he gave me external direction, things like 'lower your voice' or 'don't use your hands' or "don't take your eyes off him.' He was just the opposite of (Elia) Kazan, (Fred) Zinnemann or other people I've worked with as directors."
If you're thinking that angered Saint, you're wrong. She turned his controlling nature into an asset.
"He told me the clothes I was to wear and he was very meticulous about the jewelry," she said. "Because of all these external things he gave me, I was able to figure out what kind of lady she was. That's how he worked. He had confidence in his casting. He really did. When you walked on that set, you knew you were the only one to play that role - and that's a great feeling."
Saint remembered it all with delight, even the times she tried to apply her acting method by asking Hitchcock why her character did such and such a thing.
"I don't know," Hitchcock would tell her. "Go ask Ernest Lehman (the screenwriter). He wrote it."
Of course, when Saint asked Lehman, a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock, he'd tell her to go ask Hitchcock.
Looking back, Saint felt "it wasn't confining" working Hitchcock's way - and she got to be in one of his biggest hits, a classic thriller that will never go out of style.
"I came off great with him," she told me. "He didn't try to make me over. I may have been one of his 'cool' blondes, but I'm a cool independent blonde. I was born on the fourth of July. That makes a difference."
Despite all the nice things most of his actors have said about him, it's likely people still will believe the few who say nasty things. That seems to be the way of our world. On the other hand, even the actors who don't remember Hitchcock fondly probably would have to admit people seem to remember the films they made with Hitchcock long after they've forgotten all the others they made.
© 2000 by Ron Miller
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |
Want to sponsor this page? Call 650-949-5573 about the sponsorship program for TheColumnists.com.