This Day in Horror History: Happy Birthday Janet Leigh!
On this day in horror history, Janet Leigh (born Jeanette Helen Morrison) was born in 1927. Leigh is perhaps best known for being the mother of Halloween and Prom Night scream queen supreme Jamie Lee Curtis.
But maybe, more importantly, she starred as the doomed Marion Crane in The Birds and Vertigo director Alfred Hitchcock’s prototype slasher flick Psycho with Anthony Perkins. A role that earned her Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress.
Her marriage to Some Like It Hot and Spartacus actor Tony Curtis (Jamie Lee’s father) ended in 1962, and Leigh scaled back her career.
That said she had already starred in such genre classics as Citizen Kane director Orson Welles’s film noir Touch of Evil and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate with Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury.
And let’s not forget William F. Claxton’s cult classic giant killer bunny picture, Night of the Lepus with Stuart Whitman and Rory Calhoun.
She also appeared in two horror films with her daughter: John Carpenter’s The Fog with Adrienne Barbeau and Tom Atkins and Steve Miner’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later with Michelle Williams and Josh Hartnett.
She died at the age of 77 in October 2004 after a year-long battle with vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels.
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