Janet Leigh (1927-2004)
Actress who starred in 'Psycho' and 'A Touch of Evil'. 8x10 b/w signed FANTASTIC full length shot from 'Psycho'. She signed it 'Psycho-tically yours! Janet Leigh'.
Janet Leigh's Salary for Psycho (1960) was $25,000
Personal quotes:
When asked if it was true that she doesn't take showers: "It's actually, honestly true. And not because of the shooting of it. It was the seeing of it. It never dawned on me how truly vulnerable we are. But that's what Hitchcock did. A shower. A bird. All these things that are absolutely ordinary, he made extraordinary."
"'Psycho' gave me very wrinkled skin. I was in that shower for seven days - 70 set-ups. At least, he [Hitchcock] made sure the water was warm."
Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#99). [1995]
During the making of Touch of Evil (1958), Leigh worked with a broken arm. Her arm was in a cast when she showed up for production, so they took her arm out of the cast and used every trick they could to hide it.
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Millions of female moviegoers swore they'd never step into a shower again after seeing this pretty, curvaceous blond actress hacked to death in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). The performance earned Leigh an Oscar nomination, and it remains the career high point of a talented actress who survived the studio system to appear in some of the most noteworthy films of the 1950s and 1960s. She was initially signed to MGM after being spotted by Norma Shearer while still in her teens (debuting in 1947's The Romance of Rosy Ridge), but only a handful of her films there were memorable, notably Little Women (1949), the baseball fantasy Angels in the Outfield (1951), and the psycho-Western The Naked Spur (1953).
In 1951 Leigh married Universal contract player Tony Curtis, and they were celebrated as Hollywood's Perfect Young Couple, appearing together in Houdini (1953), The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), The Perfect Furlough and The Vikings (both 1958). She played the luscious younger sib in the musical My Sister Eileen (1955), a Russian flier in the campy Jet Pilot (1957), a newlywed kidnapped by drug dealers in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), and long-suffering girlfriends in two wildly different films, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Bye Bye Birdie (1963, in which she performed an energetic dance routine). Leigh was more active on TV than in features from the late 1960s on, as an attractive, mature lead or in strong secondary roles. She costarred with daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in The Fog (1980). In 1984 she published an autobiography, "There Really Was a Hollywood" and her memoir of the filming of Psycho appeared in 1995.
OTHER FILMS INCLUDE: 1947: If Winter Comes 1949: Holiday Affair, That Forsyte Woman 1951: Two Tickets to Broadway 1952: Scaramouche 1953: Walking My Baby Back Home 1954: Living It Up 1955: Pete Kelly's Blues 1960: Who Was That Lady? 1963: Wives and Lovers 1966: An American Dream, Harper, Three on a Couch 1972: One Is a Lonely Number 1979: Boardwalk.
Copyright © 1994 Leonard Maltin
