Actress. Author. Icon. Activist.

With a Hollywood career spanning more than five decades, Tippi Hedren has achieved icon status several times over. Commanding the big screen in Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller The Birds, she has long captivated movie viewers and makers alike. From Hitchcock to Chaplin, industry greats have always been eager to bring Tippi’s elegance and beauty to the big screen.

Kicking off her career in Minnesota as a teenaged department store model, Tippi signed with Eileen Ford as soon as she moved to New York at age twenty, and quickly landed on the covers of magazines like Glamour, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post and in the TV advertisements that launched her film career—which, in turn, launched her activism.

Inspired by a 1969 stint on set in Africa, Tippi fell in love with lions, tigers, and other wild animals, developing concern for their treatment and well-being and prompting her to found the Roar Foundation and the Shambala Preserve, a 72-acre rescue just outside of Los Angeles where she lives and provides sanctuary to assorted wild cats. In fact, she raised her daughter, Melanie Griffith, with a number of lions and tigers living in and out of the family’s house.

These often harrowing escapades were filmed for the cult movie, Roar, the making of which was later detailed in her 1988 book The Cats of Shambala and in her 2016 memoir Tippi. With her own quasi-metoo history with Hitchcock also chronicled in her book, Tippi has been vocal in her support of actresses speaking out against the sexual harassment so prevalent in the industry

With a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Golden Globe under her belt, Tippi returned to her modeling career in 2018. At the age of 88 she became the new face of Gucci watches and jewelry.

Inspired. Inspiring. Visionary.

Bio by Merrill Feitell