Leigh, Janet

(b. 6 July 1927 in Merced, California; d. 3 October 2004 in Beverly Hills, California), actress who achieved iconic status as the tragic Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark horror thriller Psycho.

Leigh, who was born Jeanette Helen Morrison, was the only child of Fred Morrison, an insurance and real estate salesman, and Helen Lita (Westergaard) Morrison. Both parents drank excessively and argued constantly. When Leigh was two years old, her family moved to Stockton, California, in the hope of better employment opportunities. The young girl was star-struck, idolized the Hollywood movie stars she read about, and distracted her parents from quarreling by talking about the films she had seen.

A precocious child, Leigh had skipped three grades by the time she graduated from Weber Grammar School in February 1940. At Stockton High School she took singing, piano, and tap-dancing lessons. Like most teenagers, Leigh wanted to be accepted and was frustrated because she was not allowed to go out with boys. During her high school years, Leigh was a drum major in the school band, the secretary of her class, and a member of the choir in her Presbyterian church. In 1941 Leigh’s family moved back to Merced, where she met her first love. Lying about her age, Leigh eloped in 1942 with John Carlyle, who was only nineteen years old himself. Leigh’s parents intervened because she was underage; they quickly had the marriage annulled. The dissolved union became a dark secret that weighed heavily on Leigh’s conscience.

In September 1943 Leigh entered the College of the Pacific (now the University of the Pacific) in Stockton, where she majored in music and minored in psychology. She left college in 1944 when she met Stanley Reames, a sailor with ambitions of becoming a bandleader. Leigh and Reames were married in 1945. Leigh’s career in acting began in 1946, when she was discovered by Norma Shearer, a film star of the 1930s who was vacationing at the Sugar Bowl Ski Lodge in Soda Springs, California. Shearer saw a photograph of a fresh-faced teenager on the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist, who turned out to be Fred Morrison, told Shearer that his daughter was the young woman in the photograph. Shearer asked for a copy of the picture to take back to her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Leigh then received a letter from Music Corporation of America, a talent agency, to discuss representation. She bought a soft pink cotton dress for $7.95 for her screen test, in order to make the best impression within her meager means. Leigh was immediately signed to a seven-year exclusive contract with MGM at $50 a week.

Leigh worked with the MGM drama coach Lillian Burns and received her first film role in The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947), a Civil War drama with Van Johnson, Thomas Mitchell, and Dean Stockwell. Leigh played the ingenue, a naive mountain girl. Following this initial success, Leigh began a regime of acting classes, singing lessons, and publicity sessions. Her name change was suggested by Van Johnson, inspired by General Robert E. Lee.

In 1948 Leigh played a Scottish lass in Hills of Home, a film that also featured Lassie, the famous trained collie. Leigh and Reames moved to a one-bedroom duplex apartment in Culver City, California, three blocks from the MGM studio. Although Leigh was now working steadily, she had been traveling to the studio by bus. After moving to the new apartment, she borrowed money to furnish it and walked to work to save time and money. In 1948 Leigh appeared as the wife of the composer Richard Rodgers in Arthur Freed’s musical Words and Music, a film about Rodger’s songwriting partnership with Lorenz Hart. Leigh’s marriage to Reames, however, began to suffer. As Reames’s ambitions to be a professional musician dissipated, Leigh became part of Hollywood’s high society, attending costume balls and associating with such other stars as Elizabeth Taylor. Leigh was photographed at restaurants and nightclubs as part of her glamorous new image.

Leigh made a number of moderately successful films in the late 1940s. She was cast in Act of Violence (1948), directed by Fred Zinnemann. The cast and crew cured Leigh of saying “I’m sorry” if she botched a line by insisting that she put money in a jar every time she apologized. Their good-natured teasing was a sign of her acceptance by her peers, who were genuinely fond of the delightful and hard-working young actress. Leigh’s next role was that of Meg, the sensible sister, in Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 production of Little Women. Dance lessons were required for Leigh’s part in The Red Danube (1949), in which she played a Russian ballerina. At the end of 1949, a year in which Leigh worked in six different films, MGM loaned her to Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures for Holiday Affair (1949) and Jet Pilot (shot in 1950), directed by Josef von Sternberg and costarring John Wayne. Leigh played a defecting Russian pilot in the second film, which was not released until 1957.

Leigh’s private life was disrupted by the end of her marriage to Reames in 1948. Leigh assumed all her husband’s debts, gave up the apartment in Culver City, and moved back into her parents’ home. She began dating other men, including the singer Danny Scholl and the actor Arthur Lowe, Jr. Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire who became a movie producer in the 1930s, also pursued her. Hughes contrived a series of meetings with Leigh, but she did not return his interest. Leigh then met a dashing contract player with Universal Studios named Tony Curtis. The couple married on 4 June 1951 and immediately became the focus of media and tabloid attention. They had two daughters, Kelly Lee Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, both of whom became well-known actresses in their own right.

After Leigh’s marriage to Curtis, her public image changed from a demure “girl next door” to a sexy siren. She starred in Just This Once (1952) with Peter Lawford and Richard Anderson and in Scaramouche (1952) with Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer. Leigh and Curtis, who were considered Hollywood’s perfect couple, appeared together in six movies in the early and mid-1950s, including the biographical film Houdini (1953), a box-office success. Constantly in the public eye, the couple moved in social circles that included the film legend Humphrey Bogart. Leigh endorsed a ready-to-wear dress line on the basis of her popularity and wholesome image. She also appeared with Curtis as a guest on Edward R. Murrow’s television program, Person to Person.

Leigh appeared in another 1953 film, Universal Studios’ Walking My Baby Back Home, a low-budget musical. She starred the following year with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the Paramount musical comedy Living It Up! (1954). After filming Rogue Cop, a crime melodrama also made in 1954, Leigh was released by MGM. Music Corporation of America signed her to Columbia Pictures for five films and Universal Studios for another four. These films included My Sister Eileen (1955), another musical comedy, and Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), a gangster movie. Leigh rejected the offer of a role in Pipe Dream, a 1955 Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, because her husband had become a well-established film star in Los Angeles.

The films that Leigh made in the late 1950s and early 1960s included some of her best-known roles, such as that of Susan Vargas in Touch of Evil (1958), directed by Orson Welles. Leigh had broken her arm prior to the film’s production. Her role was physically demanding, but she gamely allowed the plaster cast on her arm to be removed for scenes in which it could not be concealed. Leigh’s character, the new bride of a Mexican narcotics officer played by Charlton Heston, is menaced in a motel room by a drug- and sex-crazed gang of criminals. Leigh’s performance showcased her dramatic talents and sensuality as well as demonstrating her high degree of professional commitment.

Although Leigh’s marriage to Curtis was strained by her husband’s irresponsible spending, compulsive gambling, and sexual infidelity, the two stars appeared together in The Vikings (1958) and The Perfect Furlough (1958), the latter film directed by Blake Edwards. Leigh also appeared with Curtis and Dean Martin in a comedy, Who Was That Lady? (1960).

Leigh then took the role for which she is best remembered, that of Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho (1960). Leigh’s voluptuous figure had been hidden by costumes throughout much of her career but was displayed in the opening scene of Hitchcock’s film, with the actress sitting on a bedina white brassiere with her lover. In a later scene, when Marion decides to steal from her boss’s wealthy client, she appears in black undergarments that symbolize her turn to the dark side. Still early in the picture, after a tense drive through the rainy night, Marion arrives at the Bates Motel, where she struggles with her guilt in the presence of the neurotic Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins. Marion decides to return the stolen money but is punished for her sins when Norman, a transvestite dressed in his mother’s clothes, knifes her to death in the shower. Leigh appears to be completely naked in the famous shower scene, an illusion achieved by a carefully positioned moleskin bikini, well-planned camera angles, and a brilliant montage. Leigh’s performance in Psycho became the paradigm for the “scream queen” personae that dominated the horror and slasher films of the 1970s. Leigh received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award for her performance.

The early 1960s marked a turning point in Leigh’s private life. Her father committed suicide in 1961 as her marriage to Curtis continued to disintegrate. Leigh traveled to South America in 1962 to promote the Peace Corps after Robert Kennedy, attorney general of the United States and the brother of President John F. Kennedy, enlisted her for the U.S. Information Services. Leigh and Curtis divorced amicably that same year, with a generous settlement that allowed Curtis to marry his paramour Christine Kaufmann and gave him unrestricted access to his daughters. After the divorce, Leigh was introduced to Robert Brandt, a stockbroker. Their marriage, which also took place in 1962 and lasted until the end of Leigh’s life, gave her the support and stability she had long desired.

Leigh’s roles in the 1960s included the part of Rosie in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Frank Sinatra, and another character named Rosie in the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963). She also appeared in Harper (1966) with Paul Newman, Three on a Couch (1966) with Jerry Lewis, and Grand Slam (1967), a mystery story. In the 1970s she had roles in One Is a Lonely Number (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), and Boardwalk (1979). Leigh continued to make films in the 1980s, including John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), another horror movie. In 1998 she appeared in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, heir to the scream queen tradition that Leigh had begun almost forty years earlier.

In addition to her work in films, Leigh appeared on television in a number of popular series, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, The Virginian, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Tales of the Unexpected, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and Murder, She Wrote.

Leigh died at her Beverly Hills home at the age of seventy-seven on 3 October 2004 after suffering from vasculitis for over a year. Her professionalism, lack of pretension, and spirited goodwill made her a beloved public figure as well as a memorable actress.

There Really Was a Hollywood (1984) is Leigh’s autobiography. Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller (1995), which Leigh wrote with Christopher Nickens, also contains autobiographical elements. Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (both 5 Oct. 2004).

Vincent LoBrutto