European Film Star Postcards: Janet Leigh

17 June 2023

Janet Leigh

American actress Janet Leigh (1927-2004) starred in more than 50 films, but will always be remembered for the 45 minutes that she was on the screen in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Her shower scene became a film landmark. She was nominated for an Oscar and received a Golden Globe. Also unforgettable are her roles in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in which she starred with Frank Sinatra. Leigh and Tony Curtis were married from 1951 to 1962.

Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 3228. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Janet Leigh in Rogue Cop (Roy Rowland, 1954).

Spanish postcard by Archivo Bermejo, no. C 44. Photo: Universal International. With Tony Curtis.

West-German postcard by Ufa/Film-Foto, Berlin-Tempelhof, no. FK-917. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Janet Leigh in The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953). The German title is Nackte Gewalt.

British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 892. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

West German postcard by Krüger, no. 902/2.

The local cinema as a babysitter

Janet Leigh was born Jeanette Helen Morrison in 1927 as the only child of a very young married couple, Helen Lita (née Westergaard) and Frederick Morrison in Merced, California. She spent her childhood moving from town to town due to her father's changing jobs. A bright child who skipped several grades in school, Leigh took music and dancing lessons, making her public debut at age 10 as a baton twirler for a marching band.

Her favourite times were the afternoons spent at the local cinema, which she called her "babysitter." After high school, she studied music and psychology at the College of the Pacific in Stockton. In the winter of 1945, she stayed at Sugar Bowl, a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, with her parents.

Leigh's mother was working at a ski lodge where actress Norma Shearer was vacationing. Shearer was impressed by a photograph of then-eighteen-year-old Leigh taken by the ski club photographer over the Christmas holiday. Shearer brought Leigh to the attention of MGM talent agent Lew Wasserman who offered the girl a contract. Leigh left the College of the Pacific to take acting lessons from Lillian Burns. Her prior acting experience consisted only of a college play.

One year later Leigh was at MGM, playing the ingenue in the film Romance of Rosy Ridge (Roy Rowland, 1947), a big-screen romance in which she starred opposite veteran Hollywood actor Van Johnson. The studio changed her name to Janet Leigh. The Romance of Rosy Ridge was a box-office success and the same year Leigh was cast for the film If Winter Comes (Victor Saville, 1947) with Walter Pidgeon and Deborah Kerr.

The young actress became one of the busiest contractees at the studio, building her following with solid performances in such films as Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949), The Doctor and the Girl (Curtis Bernhardt, 1950) as Glenn Ford's love interest, and the Swashbuckler Scaramouche (George Sidney, 1952), starring Stewart Granger.

Van Johnson and Janet Leigh on the set of The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947)

Belgian postcard, no. 61. Photo: M.G.M. Van Johnson and Janet Leigh on the set of The Romance of Rosy Ridge (Roy Rowland, 1947).

Dutch postcard by Van Leer's Fotodrukindustrie N.V., Amsterdam, no. 3541. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

Italian postcard by Bromostampa, Milano, no. 91.

Belgian collectors card by Kwatta, Bois -d'Haine, no. C. 121 (in the series C. 99 - 196). Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Belgian postcard, no. 850. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The darlings of fan magazines and columnists

Janet Leigh caught the eye of RKO Radio's owner Howard Hughes, who hoped that her several RKO appearances on loan from MGM would lead to something substantial in private life. Instead, Leigh married Tony Curtis who became her third husband at 25.

During her final year of high school, Leigh married eighteen-year-old John Kenneth Carlisle in Reno in 1942. The marriage was annulled five months later. Her second marriage to Stanley Reames (1946-1948) lasted two years.

Curtis and Leigh became the darlings of fan magazines and columnists, as well as occasional co-stars in such films as Houdini (George Marshall, 1953), The Black Shield of Falworth (Rudolph Maté, 1954), and The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958) with Kirk Douglas.

Even as this 'perfect' Hollywood marriage deteriorated in the late 1950s, Leigh's career prospered. In the Film Noir Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), she starred opposite Charlton Heston and Orson Welles. Among her significant roles in the 1960s were that of Frank Sinatra's enigmatic lady friend in The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962), and Paul Newman's ex-wife in the mystery Harper (Jack Smight, 1966).

Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "And, of course, the unfortunate embezzler in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), who met her demise in the nude (actually covered by a moleskin) and covered with blood (actually chocolate sauce, which photographed better) in the legendary 'shower scene'." The part of Marion Crane would become her most famous role and she received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for it.

Swedish postcard by Förlag Torsten G. Ericsson, Hälsingborg, no. AX 865. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Small German collectors card in the 'Film Stars der Welt ' series by Greiling-Sammelbilder, series E, no. 152. Photo: RKO.

French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 475. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1954.

British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 691. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Vera Miles, John Gavin and Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960)

Austrian flyer (front) by Neues Film-programm, no. 2073, October 1960. Photo: Afex. Vera Miles, John Gavin and Janet Leigh in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960).

The Mother of Jaimie Lee

Meanwhile, Janet Leigh had become the mother of two daughters, Kelly (1956) and Jamie-Lee (1958), and divorced Tony Curtis in 1962. In the same year, she remarried stockbroker Robert Brandt, with whom she would remain for the next 42 years. In order to spend more time with her family, Leigh began to put her career on hold.

She mainly played roles in television productions such as Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre (1964-1966), The Red Skelton Show (1969), and Tales of the Unexpected (1982-1984). Notable were her appearances in the feature-length television film The House on Greenapple Road (Robert Day, 1970) and her role as a forgotten film actress in Forgotten Lady (1975), an episode of the series Columbo.

She made her Broadway debut in 1975 in a production of 'Murder Among Friends'. In the cinema, she starred in the supernatural horror film The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. In the 1980s, Leigh curtailed her film and TV appearances. However, her extended legacy as both the star/victim of Psycho and the mother of actress Jamie Lee Curtis still found her a notable place in the world of cinema even if her career was no longer "officially" active.

She co-starred with Jamie Lee again in the slasher Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (Steve Miner, 1998). Leigh wrote an autobiography 'There Really Was a Hollywood' (1984), and a non-fiction 'Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller' (1995, co-authored with Christopher Nickens), as well as two novels 'House of Destiny' (1996) and 'The Dream Factory' (2002).

Janet Leigh died of vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, in 2004, at home in Beverly Hills in the presence of her family. She was 77. Leigh was cremated and her ashes were entombed at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in the Westwood Village neighbourhood of Los Angeles.