Rod Taylor The program faced stiff competition on Wednesday evenings from NBC's "Wagon Train", hence lasted for only one season. He voiced Pongo (a Dalmatian dog) in Disney's animated feature "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961) and also guest-starred on Marilyn Maxwell's short-lived ABC series "Bus Stop" around the same time. In 1962, he starred in an episode of NBC's "The DuPont Show of the Week" ("The Ordeal of Dr. Shannon"), an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's novel "Shannon's Way". Taylor starred in Alfred Hitchcock's horror/thriller "The Birds" (1963), along with Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright, and Jessica Tandy, playing a
Alfred Hitchcock York when Hitchcock saw her, in October 1961, in an NBC television ad for Sego, a diet drink: "I signed her because she is a classic beauty. Movies don't have them any more. Grace Kelly was the last." He insisted, without explanation, that her first name be written in single quotation marks: 'Tippi'. In "The Birds", Melanie Daniels, a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a bird shop; Jessica Tandy plays his possessive mother. Hedren visits him in Bodega Bay (where "The Birds" was filmed) carrying a pair of lovebirds as a gift. Suddenly waves of birds