Alfred Hitchcock Hitchcock had intended to film "Marnie" first, and in March 1962 it was announced that Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco since 1956, would come out of retirement to star in it. When Kelly asked Hitchcock to postpone "Marnie" until 1963 or 1964, he recruited Evan Hunter, author of "The Blackboard Jungle" (1954), to develop a screenplay based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, "The Birds" (1952), which Hitchcock had republished in his "My Favorites in Suspense" (1959). He hired Tippi Hedren to play the lead role. It was her first role; she had been a model in New
Rod Taylor Man" (1977) and a paid killer in "On the Run" (1983). In the black comedy "Welcome to Woop Woop" (1997), he played the foul-mouthed redneck Daddy-O. By the late 1990s, Taylor had moved into semi-retirement. In 2007, he appeared in the horror telemovie "Kaw", which revisits the idea of marauding birds turning on their human tormentors. In this film, however, the cause of the disturbance was discovered by Taylor who plays the town doctor. He appeared in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" in 2009, portraying Winston Churchill in a cameo. In 2017, a documentary on Taylor's life, "Pulling No Punches", was