Hitchcock installed secret door into star's dressing room

Director Alfred Hitchcock and actress Tippi Hedren at Cannes in 1963. Photo / AP

Alfred Hitchcock's manipulative working relationship with The Birds actress Tippi Hedren is no Hollywood secret: the abuse and isolation the British director subjected her to has inspired films and books and Hedren, now 86, is still defined by her experience of working under him.

However, new details of Hedren and Hitchcock's troubled working relationship have emerged since the publication of her new memoir, Tippi.

Hedren writes that Hitchcock's mistreatment of her continued even after the horrors of making The Birds (when he surprised her by using live, rather than mechanical, birds for the famous attacking scene and forbade the rest of the cast from socialising or touching her).

When Hedren made Marnie with Hitchcock a year later, he installed a "secret door" that connected his office to her dressing room. She writes that he would come into her dressing room and "put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became".

Hitchcock also demanded that the make-up department make a life mask of her face purely for his own purposes, not as a prop for the film.

Hedren was approached by Hitchcock after he saw her in a television advertisement for a meal-replacement shake in 1961. She signed a five-year contract before the studio would tell her who the director was.

Hitchcock died in 1980, and after Marnie Hedren went on to appear in 50 films. She writes that while "Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life".

When the Telegraph interviewed Hedren in June, she said of her time working with Hitchcock: "It was awful. It was painful, and unneeded, and sick. It wouldn't happen today. I was at the end of the studio system. It was rampant when I began."