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Alfred Hitchcock has long been revered as the master of suspense. Each of his sixty-seven films are marked with Hitchcock's identifiable flair: a mind-twistingly clever, yet unnerving plot; a cameo (only spanning a few seconds) of the portly director himself and last but not least, a magnificently blonde leading lady. But as it always goes, Hitchcock's genius came with consequences. Recently, several books have been released exposing the director's issues with women. In celebrity biographer Daniel Spoto's
Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, the author quotes Hitchcock as saying of his heroines, "Nothing pleases me more than to knock the ladylikeness out of them." According to Spoto, Hitchcock fell helplessly in love with a number of his lead actresses, one of whom - Tippi Hedren - he sent into clinical shock after having her be attacked by real birds for a full week during filming of (what else?) his 1963 classic
The Birds. He then reportedly demanded she be at his
"sexual beck and call" during the filming of
Marnie that same year.
Nonetheless Hitchcock's films remain some of the greatest cinematic experiences in recent history. In honor of what would have been Hitchcock's 111th birthday, we gathered some of the director's most memorable leading ladies - all blondes, all beautiful and all equally alluring.
- Joan Fontaine, 1940
- Carole Lombard, 1942
- Ingrid Bergman, 1945
- Marlene Dietrich, 1950
- Grace Kelly, 1954
- Anne Baxter, 1955
- Doris Day, 1956
- Kim Novak, 1958
- Eva Marie Saint, 1959
- Janet Leigh, 1960
- Tippi Hedren, 1963
- Julie Andrews, 1966
- Madeleine Carroll, 1936
