## The Long Middle: Between The Birds and Africa
Between Alfred Hitchcock and Africa — between the seven-year contract that had bound and then released her and the film project that would consume the next decade — Tippi Hedren continued to work. She made films, appeared in television productions, and maintained the professional activity of a working actress whose commercial profile had been established and then complicated by the specific circumstances of her career’s most prominent chapter.
The films she made during this period were not The Birds and were not Marnie. They occupied the middle range of commercial cinema — competently made, sometimes interesting, not defining. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) was Charlie Chaplin’s last film as director, a romantic comedy in which Hedren played a countess aboard an ocean liner; the film starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren in the lead roles, with Hedren in a smaller part. Chaplin’s comedy style, shaped by the silent era and the broad physical conventions of that period, sat uneasily against the contemporary film language of 1967, and the film was not a commercial or critical success.
She appeared in The Harrad Experiment (1973), the film on which her daughter Melanie, then fifteen or sixteen, met Don Johnson — an encounter that would lead to a marriage two years later and that is one of those biographical adjacencies that only become comprehensible in retrospect, when the subsequent years of both people’s lives are visible. Hedren and Marshall’s son Jerry also appeared in the film; it was a family production in the specific way that the entertainment industry can make family proximity feel ordinary.