Shower scenes stuck in movie-goers' minds

By ANDREW GUMBEL


Janet Leigh will always be remembered as the fresh-faced woman who takes a shower in the Bates Motel only to be slashed to death - horribly - before the end of the first reel of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

But she was also one of Hollywood's rare class acts, a woman of poise and tact who retained a certain outward formality, even when recounting the raciest details from her film career.

Yesterday, Hollywood was mourning a legend as Leigh's family announced her death at the age of 77. She had been suffering from vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels.

She died at her Beverly Hills home with her husband, Robert Brandt, and her two actress daughters, Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, at her side.

Leigh's was, in many ways, the quintessential Hollywood story.

She was plucked from obscurity, signed as a contract player with MGM in the twilight years of the studio system, catapulted to stardom, less for her acting than for her marriage to red-hot heart throb Tony Curtis, then found acclaim by playing against type in three landmark productions: Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, Hitchcock's Psycho and paranoid Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

Her modesty and deferential manner - to the end, she referred to her directors as Mr Hitchcock and Mr Welles - suggested she never forgot her origins as a small-town girl made good, who owed her career as much to luck as to talent and charm.

Jeanette Helen Morrison, as she was named at birth, would never have broken into the movies had it not been for a chance visit by the actress Norma Shearer to a ski lodge where her father was working as a desk clerk in 1946.

Shearer was taken with Morrison snr and with the photographs he showed of his 19-year-old daughter. She showed them to her talent agency friends back in Los Angeles.

The pictures were nothing special, but Lew Wasserman, the ambitious head of McA, saw them as a chance to flatter an important Hollywood figure (Shearer was, among other things, the widow of the MGM producer Irving Thalberg) and put one over a rival, Charlie Feldman at Famous Artists.

Leigh was signed to MGM for US$50 a week, even though her only acting experience was a high school production of The Pirates of Penzance.

A succession of roles as ingenues followed. Then her 1951 marriage to Curtis made her the darling of the gossip columnists - they were the Tom and Nicole of the day - and her career took off.

In 1960 Leigh helped make one of cinema's enduring images. The shower scene in Psycho was shot over seven days, culminating in the ghastly, wide-eyed scream that has remained so memorable - and left the actress with an aversion to showers that lasted for the rest of her life.

She was not naked for the shoot but wore a flesh-coloured moleskin, and the blood was not stage blood but chocolate sauce, which looked more convincing as it was flushed down the plughole.

- INDEPENDENT