Her real name was Jeanette Helen Morrison and she was born in Merced, California. The family weren’t very well off and her father had to take extra jobs to support the family.
When Janet was 18, her parents found work at a Ski resort called Sugar Bowl, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Janet’s father included a picture of her in a photo album which was left around for guests to look at. One of the people who looked at it was the actress Norma Shearer, who took one look at the photo and declared "that smile made it the most fascinating face I had seen in years. I felt I had to show that face to somebody at the studio.”
Janet had roles on radio before appearing in any films. She was a guest star on the radio dramatic anthology The Cresta Blanca Hollywood Players Christmas Special when she was 19. Her first film was The Romance of Rosy Ridge, a budget film about the American Civil War made in 1947.
It was during the making of this film that she gained her stage name. Her name was changed to "Jeanette Reames", then to "Janet Leigh", but the studio thought this might get confused with Vivien Leigh, so they changed it back to "Jeanette Morrison", but her co-star didn’t like that name and so it was changed back to "Janet Leigh".
She studied music and psychology in college and sang with the college's a cappella choir. She worked at the college's information desk to help support her family.
Watching herself in the Psycho shower scene left her with a lifelong phobia of showers. She would only ever take baths after that, and if staying somewhere where a shower was the only option, “I make sure the doors and windows of the house are locked. I also leave the bathroom door open and shower curtain open. I'm always facing the door, watching, no matter where the shower head is."
She was a writer as well as an actress and published four books. Her first book was an autobiography: There Really Was a Hollywood. This was followed by Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller and then two novels; House of Destiny in 1996 and The Dream Factory in 2002.
She was married four times. She married John Kenneth Carlisle while in high school but the marriage only lasted a few months. While at university, she met Stanley Reames, a sailor. That marriage lasted less than three years. In 1951 she married the actor Tony Curtis, a more successful marriage which lasted around a decade. She married stockbroker Robert Brandt after they divorced in 1962.
She had two daughters with Curtis, Kelly and Jamie Lee who would both become actors. In fact, Jamie Lee would take her mother’s crown of “scream queen” when she appeared in the Halloween movies. The two appeared together on screen twice, in John Carpenter ’s The Fog in 1980 and in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, where Leigh had a cameo role.
She has a ski run named after her, Leigh Lane, at Sun Valley Resort's Bald Mountain skiing area in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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