Grace Kelly: The leading lady Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with
Many worrying stories have circulated about Alfred Hitchcock’s treatment of his female leads, with the director developing a cruel and twisted working attitude as he often tormented the women on his sets. There is no denying that he had a warped perception of women that bled into his work, with the director being both obsessed by them and intent on making their lives a living hell, pushing them to harsh extremes and abusing them on set.
Whether it be the accounts of Tippi Hedren and her experiences on The Birds, with the actor accusing the director of sexual assault on multiple occasions and forcing her to perform scenes in which she was genuinely at risk, or his ritualistic humiliation of actors like Kim Novak and Madeleine Carroll.
While there are countless stories of his bizarre torture rituals and enjoyment of sadistic behaviour when it came to his female actors, there was one working relationship that stands out from his filmography, with the director developing a strong obsession with one star in particular.
Hitchcock has always shown a strange attitude towards the women in his films, describing them as being akin to beautiful but empty objects and showing little respect towards their interior world or intelligence. To the director, all women were inferior and incapable of providing the same kind of performances as his male actors, claiming that they were noticeably lacking in depth compared to their male co-stars.
However, while he dismissed the talent of many of the women he worked with, there was one who he described as being different to the others, developing an obsession with Grace Kelly after working with her on films like To Catch A Thief, Rear Window and Dial M for Murder.
Kelly is one of the most renowned stars from the Golden Hollywood era, becoming an emblem of grace and style after effortlessly magnetic performances throughout her work with Hitchcock and beyond. After quitting her day job as an actor to become a full-blown princess, she is one of the most intriguing performers of her generation, with a brief but hugely influential impact on the medium as a whole.
However, while she might have collaborated with Hitchcock on some of the most powerful works from his filmography, with her performance in Rear Window becoming one of the definitive stories from his slate of films, she had a very strange working relationship with the director as a result of being his strange personal favourite.
The director praised her appearance and combination of “frigidity and lust”, believing he saved her from being typecast as a ‘cold woman’ through her work with him. He described her as a “volcano covered in snow”, and was drawn towards subjecting her characters to violence, adding in the assault scene in Dial M for Murder that took five days to film and left her covered in bruises. He was described as someone who enjoyed having control over her and being able to exert power over her while filming, deriving sadistic pleasure from violent scenes. Hitchcock’s psychology could be endlessly analysed, but it seems as though his relationship to women was extremely disturbing and complex, and this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
