Hitchcock's Blondes

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Bestselling author Laurence Leamer shares an engrossing account of the enigmatic director Alfred Hitchcock that puts the dazzling actresses he cast in his legendary movies at the center of the story. Alfred Hitchcock was fixated on the blond actresses who starred in many of his iconic movies. The lengths he went to in order to showcase (and often manipulate) these women would become the stuff of movie legend. In Hitchcock’s Blondes, Laurence Leamer offers an intimate journey into the lives of eight legendary actresses whose stories helped chart the course of the troubled, talented director’s career—from his early days in the British film industry to his Hollywood heyday and beyond. Through the stories of June Howard-Tripp, Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and Tippi Hedren—who starred in fourteen of Hitchcock’s most notable films—we can finally start to see the enigmatic man himself. “His” blondes knew the truths of his art, his obsessions and desires, as well as anyone. This is an intimate, revealing look at both the enduring art created by a man obsessed and the private toll that fixation took on the women in his orbit.