12 People Who Totally Broke The Law To Make Great Movies

7. Alfred Hitchcock Liked To Abuse Actresses

Despite the narrative history that Alfred Hitchcock loved women - and a very particular type of women - by all accounts, he wasn't exactly the nicest man to work for if you were of the female persuasion. To put it more bluntly, he was a bit of a sh*t to his leading ladies. Tippi Hedren's performance in The Birds is heralded as a truly authentic portrait of deranged fear, and that has far more to do with the fact that Hitchcock spent five days pelting her with live angry birds, when he wasn't feeding whisky to seagulls to get them to stay still for longer.

She was also slathered in bird poo, which did nothing for her genuine phobia of birds, and spent a week filming the climactic scene where she was trapped upstairs in her house with the birds (which were tied to her to convey real threat). After that week, Hedren ended up in hospital with exhaustion and bird-injuries for seven days and called it "the worst week of my life." Just to be even more creepy, the director gave Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith a present of a doll that looked eerily like Hedren in an ornate wooden box it came in that Griffith thought was a coffin.

But it was all just affection, apparently, as the director proved by paying his crew to sexually proposition her: when she reacted badly, Hitchcock basically ruined her.