Janet Leigh

Leigh got married to John Kenneth Carlisle on August 1, 1942. While John was 18 at the time of marriage, Leigh was only 15 but falsely claimed to be 18-year-old. As a result of this, the marriage lasted only four months and was annulled on December 28 in the year 1942.

Sshe again got married to Stanley Reames on October 5, 1945. This time she reached the age of 18 and the marriage lasted for almost 4 years and finally, she was divorced on the 7th of September in 1949.

Leigh got married for the third time when she decided to get hitched with actor Tony Curtis. She gave birth to two children, Kelly and Jamie Lee. Both of their daughters later went on to become successful actresses. In 1962, her marriage to Curtis ended in divorce when he sent her the divorce papers on the set of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’.

Janet Leigh was born Jeanette Helen Morrison in Merced, California, on July 6, 1927. She was the only child of Frederick Robert Morrison and Helen Lita. She spent all her childhood growing up in California. Her mother had Danish blood whereas her father had a mixture of German and Scottish ancestry.

Her acting talent was discovered in 1945 by Norma Shearer, who offered her an MGM contract. Shearer showed a picture of Leigh to a talent agent, Lew Wasserman. This picture was taken when she was spending her holidays at Sugar Bowl, in a ski resort where her parents used to work.

Leigh was studying Psychology and Music at the College of the Pacific, which she left after securing a contract with MGM. She ventured into the acting world without any prior experience under the mentorship of the famous drama coach, Lillian Burns.

Leigh was a guest star on a local radio show before she began her acting career. It was a very small dramatic anthology called ‘The Cresta Blanca Hollywood Players’. The first radio show appearance was in a production called ‘All Through the House,’ which was aired on December 24 in the year 1946.

Leigh starred opposite Van Johnson, as his romantic interest, in her debut role in a big budget movie called ‘The Romance of Rosy Ridge’ in the year of 1947. She grabbed this role while performing Phyllis Thaxter's long dialogue in the script of ‘Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo’.

During the shooting, Leigh's had her named changed to ‘Jeanette Reames’ initially, after which it was changed to ‘Janet Leigh’. But since this name resembled Vivien Leigh, it was again changed back to her birth name - ‘Jeanette Morrison.’ But Johnson was not appreciative of her maiden name and as a result, it was changed back to ‘Janet Leigh’ for good.

After making her film debut, Leigh decided to leave her college, but after few days she enrolled into night school at the University of Southern California in the year 1947.

After ‘The Romance of Rosy Ridge’ was released, she was cast in a film named ‘If Winter Comes in the year 1947’, starring opposite Deborah Kerr and Walter Pidgeon.

Leigh also was an accomplished writer. She wrote four books which received good reviews from critics. Her first work ‘There Really Was a Hollywood’ was published in the year 1984 and went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

She also published a non-fiction book ‘Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller’ in the year 1995.

In the year 1996, she wrote and published her very first novel called ‘The House of Destiny’. The story of the novel revolved around the lives of a couple of friends who were successful in forging an empire which was able to alter the course of the history of Hollywood.

‘The House of Destiny’ was very successful and its success motivated her to write a follow-up novel in the year 2002 which was named as ‘The Dream Factory’. The plot of the story was set in Hollywood in a period which was dominated by the studio system