Hollywood’s cat women

Sharing breakfast with a fully-grown lion, lounging elegantly with leopards or waking to the roar of tigers, Hollywood royalty Tippi Hedren has devoted more than half a lifetime to saving and conserving the big cats that rule her home and heart. Some movie stars amass diamonds, designer mansions or divorces. This evergreen actress, who drove director Alfred Hitchcock wild while they were making The Birds, prefers to play “den mother” to a pride of apex predators at the Shambala Preserve she founded outside LA in 1972.

“Everything I’ve done in my life was to lead to my work with animals. If people could be as honest as animals, what a different world it would be,” says the diminutive, indomitable 89-year-old, who rescues and re-homes unwanted or abandoned big cats at her sprawling desert property. Fittingly, perhaps, many of them are show business cast-offs from circuses and zoos, or retired from filmmaking.

“I could really use a corporate sponsor. People think because you’re in the movies, you’re rich,” smiles Tippi, an award-winning wildlife crusader whose love affair with lions started on the African set of in 1969, and survived, co-starring daughter Melanie Griffith and 100 big cats.