Janet Leigh, Psycho
Janet Leigh, whose shower scene in Psycho has become part of cinema's pop iconography, died yesterday, Oct. 3, at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 77. In the past year, Leigh had been suffering from vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels.
Though best remembered as the greedy (and unlucky) office worker who gets stabbed a zillion times in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), a role for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, Leigh had a remarkable film career that spanned more than five decades.
Remarkable indeed, considering that after being discovered by former MGM Queen Norma Shearer at a ski resort in the late 1940s, Leigh (born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, in Merced, California) was usually cast in innocuous parts in equally innocuous films — e.g., the Lassie flick Hills of Home (1948), the all-star musical Words and Music (1948), the comedy Fearless Fagan (1952) — in which she was required to look either very blonde or very bland — at times both.
Even so, during her MGM stint Leigh did manage to make her mark in Fred Zinnemann's thriller Act of Violence (1948), opposite Robert Ryan, Van Heflin, and Mary Astor; in Mervyn LeRoy's generally (and in my view unfairly) dismissed 1949 version of Little Women (as Meg); and as a feisty tomboy in Anthony Mann's solid Western The Naked Spur (1953), starring Ryan, Ralph Meeker, and James Stewart.
From 1951 to 1962 she was married to Universal star Tony Curtis (her third of four husbands), with whom she co-starred in five films: George Marshall's biopic Houdini (1953), Rudolph Maté's semi-historical drama The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), Richard Fleischer's rousing adventure epic The Vikings (1958), Blake Edwards' army comedy The Perfect Furlough (1958), and George Sidney's marital comedy Who Was That Lady? (1960). (Actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis are their daughters.)
Those last three titles were released during Leigh's career peak, which also included the aforementioned Psycho; a challenging role — and quite possibly the best performance of her career — as the wife of Mexican police officer Charlton Heston in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (above, 1958); what amounted to a supporting turn in John Frankenheimer's paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962), opposite Frank Sinatra; and one of the leads in George Sidney's satirical musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963), with Dick Van Dyke and Ann-Margret.
Leigh's movies diminished in both quantity and prestige in the mid-1960s, though she continued working in sporadic features. Those included Jack Smight's detective comedy-thriller Harper (1966), with Paul Newman; William F. Claxton's grade-Z horror flick Night of the Lepus (1972), with fellow veterans Stuart Whitman and Rory Calhoun; Stephen Verona's family drama Boardwalk (1979), with Ruth Gordon and Lee Strasberg; and John Carpenter's cult horror classic The Fog (1980), with daughter Jamie Lee Curtis.
In addition, Leigh was featured in numerous television productions. Among those were the TV movies House on Greenapple Road (1970), Deadly Dream (1971), and Murder at the World Series (1977), and series such as The Red Skelton Show, Columbo, Fantasy Island, and an inevitable guest spot on The Love Boat.
More recently, Leigh could be seen in the television movie In My Sister's Shadow (1997); the horror thriller Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), also with Jamie Lee Curtis; the TV series Family Law, and, what turned out to be her last film appearance, the comedy Bad Girls from Valley High (2005).
A lifelong Democrat, in the 1960s Janet Leigh actively campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, and for John and Robert Kennedy. Her autobiography, There Really Was a Hollywood, was published in 1984.
As for her Psycho shower bit, Leigh stated that it "scared the hell" out of her when she first saw the finished sequence.
"Making it and seeing it are two different things. That staccato music and the knife flashing. You'd swear it's going into the body."
Janet Leigh should have won the Oscar for Psycho. Shirley Jones was good in Elmer Gantry, but the Psycho victim was a more complex, more gripping role.
Janet Leigh should also have been nominated for Touch of Evil and An American Dream.
And she could do comedy as well, like Who Was That Lady?
like me that actress,is genial.