Tippi Hedren: the lion queen of Hollywood
The actor Tippi Hedren, whom we all remember from her performances in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds and his mystery drama Marnie, also happened to have a very peculiar and highly dangerous home life. During the early 1970s, Hedren shared her home with a 400-pound, mature male lion named Neil. It’s another example that adds to the long list of celebrities and their curious desire to keep exotic and dangerous animals as pets. However, the backstory surrounding Hedren, her ferocious housemate, and the events that transpired is a shocking one.
Aside from her achievements as an actor, Hedren has worked extensively in animal rights and conservation. She set up her ‘Roar Foundation’ and the animal sanctuary, Shambala Preserve, in California in the 1980s – organisations that advocate for big cats, such as lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, cheetahs, and bobcats.
Anyone who has seen the hit Netflix documentary Tiger King will know that the exotic pet trade, particularly the buying, selling, and breeding of big cats, is a lucrative business. Hedren’s foundations rescue these felines from private owners, and she has won numerous awards for her conservation work over the years.
According to her biography, Tippi: A Memoir, Hedren says her infatuation with big cats began in 1969 when she was filming in Africa on the sets of Satan’s Harvest and Mister Kingstreet’s War. By 1971, she had adopted Neil, a fully grown male lion, and had him live in her family home in California along with her husband, Noel Marshal, the talent agent and film producer, and her teenage daughter, Melanie Griffith.
What’s most crazy is that Neil wasn’t confined to an enclosure on the property but had the run of the entire house. The photographer for Life Magazine, Michael Rougier, spent time in Hedren’s home in 1971 and captured some truly bonkers pictures of Neil frolicking in the swimming pool, perusing what’s on offer in the kitchen fridge, and even sharing a bed with Hedren’s teenage daughter.
Luckily, Neil never mauled or harmed anyone in the family. However, after Neil, Hedren accumulated other lions that stayed in their home, and at one point or another, each family member was attacked by the animals. Since then, Hedren has admitted that having lions live in her home was “stupid beyond belief”.
But Hedren’s most disastrous moment with her big cats came during the filming of her and her husband’s movie, Roar. The film is directed by Marshal, who also stars as the lead and also stars Hedren. It follows the story of a naturalist who lives on a nature reserve with lions and tigers. The film has been described as ‘the most dangerous movie ever made’ and for a good reason. During its production, 70 people were attacked by the animals on set, one of them being Griffith, who was also cast in the picture. Griffith was mauled across the face by one of the cats and ended up requiring facial reconstruction.
Hedren and Marshal, who both produced the picture, had invested a huge amount of money into the production, having to sell their home to finance it. To abandon the shoot would financially ruin the family, and so Roar continued despite the incredibly dangerous and potentially life-threatening risks it imposed on the cast and crew. Roar was released in 1981 and only grossed $2million at the box office against its $17m budget. Today, the film has become a cult favourite amongst fans and has also been coined as ‘the most expensive home movie ever made’.
Now, Hedren lives on her Shambala Preserve in California and continues her love affair with big cats. But looking back at Michael Rougier’s photographs for Life back in the ’70s, there are some truly hair-raising and jaw-dropping pictures that capture the great actor’s bizarre home life.
