46th Issue: Tippi Hedren and the Making of Roar

Antonio Banderas gave an interview yesterday in which he said that his stepdaughter, Dakota Johnson (best known for Fifty Shades of Grey) called him Paponio growing up (Papa + Antonio) which is very cute. Dakota’s mom, who Antonio was married to for a long time, is the actress Melanie Griffith. Melanie’s mother, another actress, was Tippi Hedren. Tippi had an unconventional life even by the standards of her unconventional descendants.

 

 

Tippi Hedren was born Nathalie Kay Hedren, and was a fashion model, actress, and animal rights activist. Tippi debuted in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in 1963, and this started a beneficial but also volatile relationship between the two. He gave her an education in filmmaking, but the experience was mixed for her. On the day of the filming of the final bird attack scene, she thought that the birds would be mechanical, but it turned out that they were using real live birds with their beaks rubber banded shut. It was five straight days of getting birds thrown at her face that made Tippi break down, and a doctor ordered a week’s rest, despite Hitchcock’s protests. The movie did make her a star and brought critical acclaim.

 

 

By the 1970s, Tippi was kind of over Hitchcock’s treatment of her. He was possessive and demanding, without letting anyone come close to her as he kept a watch on her whereabouts and activities. He was obsessed with her, and was isolating her from everyone else, even her costars. Eventually she broke free of him despite his threats to blacklist her and prevent her from working again.

 

 

From 1974 onwards, Tippi and her husband Noel Marshall became obsessed with lions. They wrote and decided to have their whole family star in a film called Roar about a family’s adventures in a wildlife park full of lions and tigers.

 

 

This part of Tippi’s wife is truly Wild. She tried to rent some animals and animal trainers, but nobody would rent them THIRTY lions because they would just fight each other. So they were told to collect and train their own lions. Who the HECK told them to do this and why on earth they LISTENED to them is beyond me, but Tippi and her husband and kids raised a lion cub named Neil in their home, as shown in the pictures shared throughout this newsletter and linked here from the original LIFE magazine post. 

 

 

 Tippi and her husband Noel let the lion just chill with them all the time. They went swimming together, slept in the same bed, just treated the lion like it was another household pet. The neighbors complained, and finally Tippi and her husband bought a ranch where they got permission to rescue and raise lions, tigers, elephants and more. This ranch would also serve as the set for Roar. Filming the movie took five years. The lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs were not trained, so the scenes including them were improvised and shot many times. No animals were hurt, but over seventy members of the cast and crew were injured. Tippi’s son John, acting in the film, said, “You’re fine with lions and tigers as long as you don't show any fear. The problem is that the plot required us to show fear. These animals who had learned to respect us were totally confused when we started acting terrified."

 

 

The cinematographer had his head injured, needing over two hundred stitches. Tippi broke her leg and had scalp injuries when an elephant she was riding threw her off. She was bitten in the neck by a lion and needed over thirty stitches (that incident was kept in the film). Her daughter, Melanie, had to get fifty stitches to her face and for a time it was thought she might lose an eye. In 1979, Tippi’s husband Noel was clawed by a cheetah when trying to save the animals during a bushfire (none of the animal were hurt, but it took him years to recover, especially after he developed gangrene). The ranch flooded a year later, and three of the lions died. Tippi was determined to finish the movie no matter what, and was sure it would be a success so they continued on.

 

 

Roar was finally released worldwide in 1981. It never came out in the United States because the distributors wanted too much money, and Tippi instead wanted to use it for wildlife conservation. Even though the movie cost $17 million to make and only made $2 million, Tippi made a nonprofit called the Roar Foundation to take care of the big cats. In 2015, Tippi finally said that living with a lion was probably not the best idea, saying, that her family was "stupid beyond belief to have that lion in our house."

 

 

After Roar, Tippi did whatever movie roles she could find to make money for the foundation that helped the big cats. She also created the Shambala Preserve, her ranch in Acton California, where she lived until her death, conducting monthly tours of the area for the public. She took in various Hollywood big cats that needed to stay, such as Michael Jackson’s two Bengal tigers, Sabu and Thriller. There have been several documentaries about or in the Shambala Preserve.

 

 

A non-big cat related side note is that Tippi was basically responsible for the rise of Vietnamese-American nail salons in the United States. She was working for charity with Food for the Hungry and was visiting Vietnamese refugees in 1975 when some of the women expressed interest in her nails. She hired her manicurist to teach them how to do nails and worked with a beauty school nearby to find them jobs. Further information on this can be found in the short documentary called Happy Hands, and there is also a Tippi Hedren Nail Scholarship Fund to support professional nail education.