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Neil

"A faster tempo, city glibness, more humour [than another frequent Hitchcock heroine, Grace Kelly]. She displayed jaunty assuredness . . . and she memorized and read lines extraordinarily well.” - Alfred Hitchcock on Tippi Hedren.

Tippi Hendren is an actress of formidable gifts. But perhaps Neil was Hedren’s biggest gift to us. Prepare to be amazed. In 1971, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier spent time with Hedren, her teenage daughter Melanie Griffith (from Hedren's first marriage to Peter Griffith) her then-husband the agent and movie producer Noel Marshall (Marshall was executive producer of ‘The Exorcist’) and others at their home in California. Also in attendance, Neil, a 400-pound mature lion, who occasionally slept in the same bed as Griffith and had the run of the house from kitchen to living room to swimming pool. Despite the sheer size and might of Neil, Hedren insisted that he was a teenage Griffith's "best friend" and that she was the subject of much conversation among the kids at her school. You don’t say?! Ron Oxley, the lion’s trainer, taught the family how to act around the wild animal.

Amongst these instructions, not to scratch their noses, turn their backs (on him) or allow the animal to become possessive over objects. Neil proved such a delight that within a few months Hedren and her husband decided to adopt their own four-month-old cub. Then they took on more and more, usually from private owners who couldn’t cope or who had abused them. The cubs stayed in the house until they were old enough to be moved to ‘Shambala Preserve’ the animal sanctuary Hedren and Marshall had set up on the edge of the Mojave Desert. By 1980 the Hedren/Marshall family had moved to the preserve.

They had 71 lions, 20 tigers, 10 cougars, nine black panthers, four leopards, two jaguars and a tigon (a lion-tiger cross-breed).

Melanie Griffith in bed with Neil the lion, 1971.

Michael Rougier—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images