Return to Bodega Bay

I've been a fan of Sienna Miller for a long time now, through both the highs (Interview; that time she cursed on The Today Show) and the lows (G.I. Joe; Balthazar Getty), so I was excited to read yesterday that she's going to be playing Tippi Hedren in a BBC drama called The Girl about Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock's contentious relationship during the filming of The Birds. The basic story about what happened between Hedren and Hitchcock has been public knowledge for a while now -- basically, his quest to create his feminine ideal (the "Hitchcock blonde") reached its zenith with Hedren, whom he discovered as a model and obsessively tailored into what he wanted until he fell in love with her, effectivly playing out the plot of Vertigo in real life -- but Hedren is apparently working with the producers of The Girl to show more of what actually occurred, which until now she's kept mostly to herself.

Miller has a tendency to put her foot in it no matter what she does, but I think she's a great choice to play Hedren, whose path to becoming an actress is not too different from her own (minus the obsessive impresario part, obviously). Miller also started her career as a model, and she's a much better actress than people tend to admit -- better, I would say, than her more successful British counterpart Kiera Knightley -- and, most importantly, it's not as if she's playing that other point of obsession for Hitchcock, Grace Kelly, a doomed role for an actress if ever there were one; she's playing a woman whose career kind of began and ended within the span of a few years and never became an icon like Kelly. Overall, The Girl sounds like it could be really good, especially with Toby Jones playing Hitchcock and Hitchcock's home country of England producing the picture.

Speaking of blondes, I'm about half-way through writing my reviews for TCM's Battle of the Blondes (which ended last week); in the meantime, I thought I'd dedicate a post to some of the famous blondes who didn't make the cut -- but should have. Maybe next year.



(from top to bottom, left to right: Constance Bennett, Catherine Deneuve, Glenda Farrell, Eva Marie Saint, Faye Dunaway, Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers, Miriam Hopkins, Joanne Woodward, Jean Seberg)