How did the movie “The Birds” influence baby names in the 1960s?

Last month, HBO released an original movie called The Girl, which tells the story of director Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with actress Nathalie “Tippi” Hedren.

It reminded me that The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) — the two Hitchcock films that feature Hedren — both had an effect on U.S. baby names in the 1960s.

The horror movie The Birds, which was set in a seaside town being attacked by various types of birds, brought about the emergence of two new names in the SSA data. The first was Tippi in 1963, and the second was Pleshette (from the surname of fellow Birds actress Suzanne Pleshette) a year later:

	Girls named Tippi	Girls named Pleshette
1966	8	9
1965	12†	.
1964	10	7*
1963	6*	.
1962	.	.

How did Hedren, who was born in Minnesota in 1930, come to have the nickname Tippi?

My father gave it to me. My baptismal name is Nathalie Kay Hedren, and he thought that was too much, so he started calling me Tupsa, a Swedish term of endearment. It went from Tupsa to Tips to Tippi. I’ve never been called Nathalie.

The psychological thriller Marnie — which revolved around a deeply troubled woman named Margaret “Marnie” Edgar — wasn’t behind any debuts, but it did make the name Marnie trendy for several years:

• 1966: 246 baby girls named Marnie [rank: 604th]
• 1965: 266 baby girls named Marnie [rank: 584th]
• 1964: 112 baby girls named Marnie
• 1963: 38 baby girls named Marnie
• 1962: 31 baby girls named Marnie

The name entered the top 1,000 for the first time in 1965. It reached peak usage in 1969.

Marnie was based on a book of the same name by English author Winston Graham (who also wrote the Poldark novels).

Which of these three names — Tippi, Pleshette, or Marnie — do you like most?

P.S. Did you know that Tippi Hedren was the person who first taught Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. how to do nails?! The Vietnamese Heritage Museum in California calls Tippi the “Godmother of the Vietnamese Nail Industry.”

Sources:

• The Birds – Wikipedia
• Marnie – Wikipedia
• Keaveny, Tami. “A conversation with Hitchcock ingénue Tippi Hedren.” C-VILLE Weekly 5 Nov. 2013.
• Tran, My-Thuan. “A mix of luck, polish.” Los Angeles Times 5 May 2008.
• Brody, Richard. “Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock.” New Yorker 18 Oct. 2012.
• SSA

Images: Screenshots of The Birds and Marnie

[Latest update: Feb. 2026]