Obituary: Janet Leigh

Janet Leigh, who has died aged 77, appeared in about four dozen films in a Hollywood career that began in 1947. But the single role that ensured her a continuing place in movie history was that of Marion Crane, who meets her fate in the gleaming white of a motel bathroom in the extraordinary shower murder sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

The sequence was, above all, a tour de force of editing, but its emotional effect depended on the identification the viewer brought earlier in the film to the sympathetic and vulnerable figure that Leigh presented. She later recalled the experience in matter-of-fact-terms: ”Hitchcock followed the storyboard precisely. We worked on it for about a week, but it went very professionally and quickly.” She added: ”It was, of course, gruelling to stand in a shower getting drenched for a week.”

Leigh, whose real name was Jeanette Helen Morrison, had originally been discovered for the movies in a fashion that seems to parallel Hollywood fiction. Her father was working as reception manager at a ski-resort hotel near Reno, Nevada, and had his daughter’s photograph on his desk. Norma Shearer, who had retired from MGM in 1942, was visiting the resort with her husband, saw the picture and casually asked if she could take it back to her old studio.

Leigh was duly sent for, and despite having no previous acting experience, was signed up to a seven-year contract. She made her screen debut in The Romance Of Rosy Ridge (1947) and progressed to prominent appearances as an ingénue in some typically plush MGM productions, co-starring with Lassie in Hills Of Home (1948) and playing Meg in Little Women and June Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga (both 1949).

Her public profile was considerably raised by her marriage, in 1951, to Tony Curtis, then a fast-rising screen heart-throb. The union generated substantial media attention, and, by extension of this, the two went on to appear together in several 1950s movies, among them the engagingly ridiculous medieval romp The Black Shield Of Falworth (1954) and the rather less engaging The Vikings (1958).

The marriage lasted until 1962, ending when Curtis saw fit to leave Leigh for the German actor Christine Kauffmann. The daughter of Curtis and Leigh’s marriage is Jamie Lee Curtis, who later followed in her parents’ professional footsteps.

During the 1950s, Leigh’s many other screen appearances ranged from a rugged western, The Naked Spur (1952) — she made ”an unlikely addition to the ranks of the western wildcats,” said one reviewer discouragingly — to providing the statutory feminine interest in a Dean Martin and Gerry Lewis farce, Living It Up (1954).

The most notable memory of this stage of her career came with a superb musical comedy, My Sister Eileen (1955). She lobbied for the role, and later enthused about the experience of preparing for the dance numbers with the choreographer Bob Fosse: ”He’s a master, he’s marvellous.” She also reflected that playing comedy was less challenging than is sometimes supposed: ”I have never played comedy anyway, except absolutely straight. If it’s funny, it’s because the situation is funny.”

In 1958, Leigh played in the film which, after Psycho, is probably the most celebrated of her career, Orsen Wells’s baroque melodrama Touch Of Evil. At the time, it was famously unsuccessful, despite having Charlton Heston as co-star, and was buried by its producers, Universal International. Years later, Heston introduced a screening of it by describing it as ”the first underground movie ever made”. Over subsequent years though, its critical standing has steadily grown.

Touch Of Evil is set in a Mexican border town, but locations were shot in a seedy part of Venice, California. Leigh remembered: ”We shot all night long, which I hated. It was a terrible place to work, but also fascinating because we worked in actual derelict hotels.” She also contrived to work throughout the film with a broken arm, having suffered an accident shortly before shooting began. ”I had my arm set in an unobtrusive way, and I’d have a coat over it and gesture a lot with my other arm.”

In Touch Of Evil, Leigh’s character spends part of the time effectively imprisoned in a sinister motel, in a fashion which curiously prefigures her role in Psycho. The sheer impact of the latter film made it a hard act to follow: Leigh, like her co-stars Anthony Perkins and Vera Miles, never seemed wholly to emerge from the long shadow it cast.

However, for several years she continued to play starring roles in prominent productions, among them The Manchurian Candidate (1962), an eccentric conspiracy thriller — and the subject of a recent updated remake — which has acquired perhaps an unjustified cult reputation.

But by the mid-1960s, Leigh began to slip into lesser roles — for instance, a cameo in the detective story Harper (1966) — or to appear in indifferent, low-budget pictures like Hello Down There (1969) or Night Of The Lepus (1972). In subsequent years, she worked only occasionally, though she starred in The Fog (1980), a horror film by John Carpenter, who had, two years before, directed Jamie Lee Curtis in the film which established her reputation, Halloween. Both castings probably reflected Carpenter’s urge to invoke the shade of Hitchcock.

Leigh published an autobiography, There Really Was A Hollywood, in 1984, and ventured into the authorship of romantic fiction. The past-tense title of her memoirs aptly summons up apprehension of a career that belonged to the vanished days of the studio system — of overnight discovery, the gilded bondage of long-term contracts, the diktat of gossip columnists and fan magazines (for whom the marriage of Leigh and Curtis represented a treasure trove of material).

As Leigh herself said of MGM, with perhaps a modicum of exaggeration: ”They used to keep about 150 people under contract, and if they got one or two out of the 150 that would be great, because they were only paying them $50 a week.”

What is incontrovertible is that MGM got more than their money’s worth for Janet Leigh. And so — in the exhilarating dance numbers of My Sister Eileen, and the motel terrors of Touch Of Evil and Psycho, plus sundry scattered moments elsewhere — did we.

She is survived by her fourth husband, Robert Brandt, and two daughters.