The Telegraph (05/Oct/2004) - Obituary: Janet Leigh

(c) Telegraph (05/Oct/2004)

Janet Leigh

Janet Leigh, who died in Los Angeles on Sunday aged 77, was a Hollywood starlet who graduated in the late 1950s to key roles in three films that ensured her lasting reputation.

These were Touch of Evil (1958), the last work that Orson Welles was able to complete in America; The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer, a very different production from the current Jonathan Demme remake; and, above all, Psycho (1960), in which Janet Leigh was butchered in the shower by Anthony Perkins after only 20 minutes in the picture.

In her younger days she had made regular appearances in fan magazines and gossip columns, especially after her marriage in 1951 to Tony Curtis, then the most idolised actor in Hollywood. The marriage was seen as made in heaven by Curtis's legions of adoring fans, much as the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman union was regarded in more recent times.

In fact, the Curtis-Leigh marriage also lasted barely a decade, ending in divorce in 1962. It did, however, produce two daughters, one of whom, Jamie Lee Curtis, has become a minor star in her own right. Mother and daughter co-starred in 1980 in the John Carpenter horror film The Fog.

Born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6 1927 at Merced, California, Janet Leigh was the daughter of an insurance and real estate agent who found it hard to make a good living. Having left high school at 15, she went on to the College of the Pacific, where she majored in Music.

She was discovered in 1947 by Norma Shearer, who spotted her photograph at a Californian ski lodge where Janet's father was working. Shearer (as the widow of boy wonder Irving Thalberg) was then regarded as the closest thing to royalty at MGM, and her recommendation opened all doors to this inexperienced ingenue and ensured her careful grooming through a series of inconsequential romantic comedies designed to captivate impressionable teenagers.

The name Janet Leigh was coined by Van Johnson, also an MGM hopeful at that time.

Her first film was The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947) and by the following year she had progressed to a supporting role in the Rodgers and Hart biopic Words and Music. By 1949, she was all over the screen - as Meg in Little Women; as June Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga; and in the female lead in Fred Zinnemann's early thriller Act of Violence.

Her career did not thrive, however, until she married Curtis. Her films in the early 1950s are now entirely forgotten. They included Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), and the Rafael Sabatini costume epic Scaramouche (1952).

After she married Curtis, MGM loaned her to Paramount for Houdini (1952), their first film together. Less fact than fiction, it nevertheless proved a box office hit, paving the way in 1953 for another costume epic, The Black Shield of Falworth. Later, in 1958, Leigh and Curtis made a third film together, The Vikings; the picture attracted some notoriety thanks to the scene in which Curtis stripped her of her Saxon tunic to enable her to row more comfortably. Never once, however, did they co-star in a modern romantic drama that might have given audiences a taste of what had initially attracted them to one another.

Asked once to describe herself, Janet Leigh said she was "a small-town girl who got lucky and worked hard to learn and improve whatever God had given me". There was always a darker side to her, however, and she characterised herself as "mild-mannered until crossed, then ballistic".

Certainly the roles she was offered at this time might have tapped her ballistic potential, but Pete Kelly's Blues (1954), My Sister Eileen (1955) and Safari (1956) gave no hint of the tougher and more sardonic actress she was later to become. Jet Pilot (1957) probably marked the breakthrough that might have happened earlier, had it been released when originally made in 1950.

One of Howard Hughes's aviation adventures, it was held back for years on his personal whim. In the end, history had overtaken it, and the action scenes that would have looked impressive in 1950 no longer seemed so. What did work was the banter between John Wayne and Janet Leigh as a Russian jet ace. Not a great film, it revealed reserves of humour in Janet Leigh hitherto unsuspected.

It is perhaps no coincidence that after this film Orson Welles used her in Touch of Evil. This was her biggest challenge to date, playing Charlton Heston's wife who is kidnapped in a Mexican border town and menaced by Mercedes McCambridge's butch gangster's moll. Janet Leigh's was not a big part, and for much of the film she was off screen imprisoned by her captors; but it was a key role, without which the plot would not have existed, and Welles directed it to the hilt. Throughout the shooting, Janet Leigh was suffering from a broken arm, and kept a coat draped over it for most of the picture.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for which she was paid $25,000, followed in 1960, and was an even bigger triumph for her. Her role, that of the luckless Marion Crane, is the one by which she will always be remembered. Having robbed her boss's safe in order to get married, she heads off into the desert and holes up overnight at the sinister Bates Motel. Overcome by shame and remorse, she plans to return the money the next morning, but has no chance to do so, since she is brutally murdered in the shower by the deranged hotelier.

Hitchcock shot the shower sequence in fragments, some 70 in all, each lasting between two and three seconds; but such a scene required a huge number of takes - far more than appear in the finished film - to give the editor enough material to work with. In all, it took seven days to shoot, but there is no truth in the rumours that Janet Leigh was naked throughout. In fact, she wore a flesh-coloured moleskin. It was a role that stayed with her for years, requiring her to change her telephone number many times to escape unwelcome calls from lunatics eager to mimic Norman Bates.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was a cameo role, but in a film that also became a classic. Janet Leigh played a girl whom Frank Sinatra meets on a train and whose common sense helps to preserve his sanity.

None of her subsequent films matched the quality of her earlier work, and she considered retiring after The Fog, making one last guest appearance in 1998 in Jamie Lee Curtis's film Halloween H20.

Janet Leigh wrote several books, including an autobiography in 1984, There Really Was a Hollywood. She was married four times, first at the age of 14 (subsequently annulled) to an 18-year-old called Kenny. Her second marriage, to bandleader Stanley Reames, lasted two years. After she and Tony Curtis divorced in 1962, she married her fourth husband Robert Brandt, a stockbroker, the same year. He survives her with her two daughters by Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kelly Curtis, also an actress.