In Remembrance: Janet Leigh

     Janet Leigh, the actress best known as the showering murder victim in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho, has passed away on Sunday, October 3, 2004 in Beverly Hills, California. She was 77.

     Born Jeannette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927 in Merced, California, Leigh’s family moved frequently while she was growing up. Not making many friends, she applied herself to her studies, skipping grades and eventually graduating high school at age 15. She went on to study music and psychology at the University of the Pacific.

     Norma Shearer, who was vacationing at a Northern California ski resort that Leigh’s father was working at, discovered Leigh. Upon seeing a picture of her that he kept with him at the front desk, Shearer asked her father for it. Shearer passed the picture to agent Lew Wasserman, who arranged a screen-test for Leigh at MGM Studios. Studio execs were impressed with her work and offered the role of young country girl Lissy Anne MacBean in the post-Civil War drama The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947). MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer renamed her Janet Leigh.

     Leigh followed up Rosy Ridge with a number of films in which she often played the young female lead. Most notable of these films are Little Women and The Forsyte Women (both 1949), Angels In The Outfield (1951) and Scaramouche (1952). In 1951, she married Tony Curtis, at the time a contract player for Universal Pictures. They would star together in five films- Houdini (1953), The Black Shield Of Falworth (1954), The Perfect Furlough and The Vikings (both 1958) and Who Was That Lady? (1960).

     Leigh appeared opposite Charlton Heston in Orson Welles’ 1958 noir classic Touch Of Evil. Shortly before production commenced, Leigh had broken her left arm, necessitating it being hidden in many shots. For certain scenes, the cast was removed than reapplied afterwards.

     In 1960, Leigh appeared as the ill-fated Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, beating out such actresses as Eva Marie Saint, Piper Laurie, Hope Lange, Shirley Jones and Lana Turner for the role. Hitchcock had wanted a big name actress in the role, hoping to play with audiences’ expectations by killing off a major character played by a star midway through the film. Although Leigh only worked on the film for three weeks, one of those weeks was spent filming the famous scene in which she is murdered in a hotel room shower. The scene only lasts for 45 seconds in the final film but was composed of 70 different camera angles and 90 different edits. In interviews, Leigh would comment that she first saw the completed sequence in conjunction with the entire film and screamed in fright. She has also stated the since then, she has never taken a shower again. Leigh earned an Academy Award nomination for the performance.

     While the 1960s saw a decline in the number of films that Leigh appeared in, though not the quality of those films. In 1962 she appeared as Frank Sinatra’s girlfriend in the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. The following year she appeared in the musical Bye Bye Birdie with Dick Van Dyke and Ann-Margaret. She starred opposite Paul Newman in Harper (1966). In the 1970s, Leigh concentrated on appearing in made for TV movies, though she did appear in 1972’s Night Of The Lepus and the 1980 horror classic The Fog.

     In 1998 Leigh appeared with her daughter, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, in the horror film Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. Her final film was the comedy A Fate Worse Than Death (2000).

     Leigh penned an autobiography, There Really Was A Hollywood in 1984 and a second book on the making of Psycho, Psycho: Behind The Scenes Of A Classic in 1995. She also wrote two novels, The Dream Factory and House Of Destiny.