The Girl after The Birds

Tippi Hedren's relationship with Hitchcock during the making of 'The Birds' and 'Marnie' is the subject of the HBO film 'The Girl.' (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

When “The Birds” actress Tippi Hedren returns to The Tides in Bodega Bay this weekend, she’ll be riding a wave of publicity for the upcoming HBO release “The Girl,” a film that maintains she was blacklisted after spurning sexual advances by director Alfred Hitchcock.

“He ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life,” she told the annual meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills in August. Last week, she traveled to London and Milan on a European press tour promoting the film.

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“Most everyone liked it. But you know I’m gonna get those people who think he was a god and he couldn’t possibly be like that,” she said in a phone interview from her house in rural Acton, California, about an hour northeast of Los Angeles. She moved there in 1976, over a decade after making her last movie with Hitchcock, to start the Shambala Preserve that rescues lions and tigers.

A few months ago, she said, when Hedren and her daughter Melanie Griffith attended an HBO screening of the film, “I’ve never seen a reaction from an audience like that. After the film was over, nobody moved. Nobody talked. And then my daughter jumped up and said, ‘Well, now I have to go back to therapy.’”

Toby Jones stars as Alfred Hitchcock and Sienna Miller stars as Tippi Hendren in 'The Girl'

Premiering October 20, “The Girl” is based on a chapter in Donald Spoto’s book, “Spellbound by Beauty,” about Hitchcock’s relationships to his leading ladies. After extensive interviews with the 82-year-old Hedren, writer Gwyneth Hughes penned the screenplay. Actress Sienna Miller plays Hedren, striking an uncanny resemblance. And Toby Jones plays the controlling British filmmaker.

“When I first heard Toby Jones doing Hitchcock, I lost my breath and thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s here,’” said Hedren. “He got the voice down perfectly. It is very creepy.”

In 1961, Hitchcock discovered Hedren in a TV commercial she did for the diet drink Sego. Before that, she’d been an Eileen Ford model for a decade. Even though she’d started doing commercials for products like Gleem toothpaste and Chesterfield cigarettes, she was considered a “non-actor” when she signed a contract with Hitchcock and he took her under his wing for drama study.