Janet Leigh

Janet Leigh, born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, in Merced, California, was an American actress, author, and businesswoman whose career spanned five decades of film, television, and stage work. She died on October 3, 2004, at the age of 77, from vasculitis.

Leigh was born to Helen Lita and Frederick Robert Morrison. Her maternal grandparents had emigrated from Denmark, and her father was of Scots-Irish and German descent. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Stockton, California, where she was raised. Her father worked in a factory and took on additional jobs following the Great Depression to support the household. Leigh attended Weber Grammar School and Stockton High School, graduating at sixteen. She subsequently studied at Stockton College before enrolling at the College of the Pacific in September 1943, where she majored in music and psychology, joined the Alpha Theta Tau sorority, and sang with the college's a cappella choir. To help support her family, she worked retail jobs during vacations and at the college's information desk during semesters. She later re-enrolled in night classes at the University of Southern California in early 1947.

Her path into acting began in February 1946, when actress Norma Shearer, vacationing at the Sugar Bowl ski resort in the Sierra Nevada, came across a photograph of the then-18-year-old Leigh that her father had placed in a guest photo album. Shearer brought the photograph to MGM talent agent Lew Wasserman upon returning to Los Angeles, which led to screen tests and, ultimately, a studio contract for Leigh despite her having no prior acting experience. She left college and trained under drama coach Lillian Burns. Before her film work began, she appeared as a guest on the radio drama anthology The Cresta Blanca Hollywood Players, with her first broadcast airing on December 24, 1946.

Leigh made her film debut in the Civil War drama The Romance of Rosy Ridge in 1947, opposite Van Johnson. A string of MGM productions followed, including If Winter Comes, the Lassie film Hills of Home, and Words and Music, in which she played the wife of composer Richard Rodgers. In 1949 she appeared in the thriller Act of Violence alongside Van Heflin and Robert Ryan, directed by Fred Zinnemann, and took the role of Meg March in MGM's adaptation of Little Women, which also starred June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor. Additional credits from that period included That Forsyte Woman opposite Greer Garson and Errol Flynn, Holiday Affair with Robert Mitchum, and the fantasy comedy Angels in the Outfield in 1951. She also appeared in the swashbuckler Scaramouche in 1952 and the Western drama The Naked Spur in 1953.

In 1951, Leigh married actor Tony Curtis, with whom she co-founded Curtleigh Productions, a company that produced several films between 1955 and 1962. She had been married twice previously in the 1940s. After departing MGM in 1954, she signed with Universal and Columbia Pictures, appearing in the adventure film Safari in 1956 and Orson Welles's film noir Touch of Evil in 1958. Leigh and Curtis divorced in 1962, and she subsequently married Robert Brandt.

Her most celebrated screen performance came in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960, in which she played Marion Crane. The role, particularly the film's shower scene, became one of the most recognized sequences in cinema history. For the performance, Leigh received the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and a nomination for the Academy Award in the same category. That same year she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The role established her as one of the earliest figures associated with the scream queen designation in horror cinema.

Following Psycho, Leigh appeared in the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate in 1962, the musical Bye Bye Birdie in 1963, and the thriller Harper in 1966. She also appeared in the horror film Night of the Lepus in 1972 and the thriller Boardwalk in 1979. She made her Broadway debut in 1975 in the production Murder Among Friends. Later in her career she starred alongside her daughter, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, in the horror films The Fog in 1980 and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later in 1998.

Outside of acting, Leigh wrote four books between 1984 and 2002, two of which were novels.