The Guardian (04/Oct/2004) - Janet Leigh dies at 77
(c) The Guardian (04/Oct/2004)
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Psycho (1960)
Janet Leigh dies at 77
The actor Janet Leigh, most famous for her role in Hitchcock's Psycho, has died at her home in Beverley Hills, her daughter's publicist said today.
Leigh began her career playing wholesome roles in the late 1940s, but made her mark with darker movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s - notably Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), in which she played the American wife put in grave danger by her marriage to a Mexican policeman, and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), when she played the sympathetic acquaintance of Frank Sinatra's brainwashed veteran.
It was Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho which sealed Leigh's place in Hollywood history; her screaming face as she is attacked in the shower by Anthony Perkins' motel owner has become one of the most recognisable film images of all time. She received an Oscar nomination for the role, but never won a statuette.
Off screen, Leigh was married at one point to Tony Curtis, with whom she had two daughters, the younger of whom is the actor Jamie Lee Curtis.
Although Leigh's career petered out toward the end of the 1960s, she returned twice to play opposite her daughter in The Fog (1980) and Halloween: H20 (1998).
Leigh had suffered from vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, for the past year. She was 77.
