Perhaps no other actor has been so closely identified with one particular role as Anthony Perkins has with his character of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and yet his career went far beyond that one film. Perkins was nominated for an Oscar®, won a Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, a Golden Globe; and an Edgar Allan Poe award for a screenplay he co-wrote with Steven Sondheim.

Anthony Perkins' roots were in show-business. His father, actor Osgood Perkins, had been a star on the stage before making the transition to films such as Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932). His mother Janet had been an actress and occasional theater manager so Perkins spent his first years around theatrical people. In 1937, Osgood Perkins died of a heart attack at the age of 45 and his son's world was turned upside down. Perkins' father had always been a distant figure, more interested in parties and women than his five year old son, and now the boy was left with an overbearing mother. He once described her as his reason for his chronic fear of women, "She wasn't ill-tempered or mean," he explained, "just strong-willed, dominant....She controlled everything about my life, including my thoughts and feelings. 'What are you reading?' 'Now where are you going?' She felt she was taking responsibility, but she was really taking control."

After his father's death he and his mother moved to Boston, where as a young man, Perkins showed an interest in acting. His first work was in 1944 in summer stock in the play Junior Miss at the Brattleboro Summer Theater in Brattleboro, VT. Perkins became a theater major at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and it was while in school that he was discovered by Hollywood and sent out to appear in a small part in The Actress (1953) opposite Jean Simmons. The film was not successful and Perkins returned to college, but left soon afterwards to transfer to Columbia University in New York. His time at Columbia was brief as he was soon hired to replace John Kerr in the stage version of Tea and Sympathy in 1954 opposite Joan Fontaine.

Hollywood is where his interest lay and Perkins was soon back, appearing in Friendly Persuasion (1956) for which he received his only Academy Award nomination. He followed this up with Fear Strikes Out (1957), a biopic about baseball player Jimmy Piersall who suffered a nervous breakdown and mental illness. The role proved difficult for Perkins who hated baseball – partly because his mother had always tried to force him to play as a child – and as a left-hander, he found it difficult to throw with his right, as Piersall did. Another problem was Piersall, who was not happy with the casting, saying he didn't want a "fairy" to play him. At this point in his life, Perkins was by all accounts exclusively homosexual. While this was not a secret in Hollywood, the public at large was not aware of it. Unlike his sometime companion, Tab Hunter, who was outed by the powerful and feared Confidential magazine, Perkins was able to keep his sexual preference a secret from his fans.

As a romantic leading man, Perkins appeared in several films in the late 1950s, including Green Mansions (1959) opposite Audrey Hepburn, but never really clicked with audiences in this type of role. Perkins' appeal was stronger in roles that cast him as a tormented outsider, especially in his most famous role of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's classic psychological thriller, Psycho.

Perkins later said, "I signed before I ever saw a script. I just wanted to work with Alfred Hitchcock. I was told I'd have the most important part, but I would have accepted any part to be in a Hitchcock film. When we met, Hitchcock told me, 'You are the film.' I didn't quite understand what he meant. I found out soon enough. I had heard something about the story, but not much. Everything was very hush-hush. I remember we all had to swear an oath that we wouldn't say anything to anyone about the story. Then, just before Psycho came out, one person was careless. Fortunately the picture was close to release and it didn't do any harm. The person let it slip that I wore a dress in the film. Hitchcock was furious though he kept his calm demeanor. I told Hitch I was tired of being a young romantic lead and I wanted to do more interesting parts; but I was a little worried about playing a homicidal transvestite. It seemed to me that there was some risk to my career in taking on a part like that."

Steve Biodrowski in his article Psycho Star Anthony Perkins wrote ,"Perkins was never resentful of the character; if anything, he seemed pleased by the recognition it afforded, and he had the sense of humor to spoof his image. While hosting a televised performance at the Comedy Club, he drew laughs simply by lapsing into the familiar Bates mannerisms, pretending to mistake a blond woman in the audience for Janet Leigh, and his Saturday Night Live sketch The Bates School of Motel Management is a classic piece of comedy... "I think it's identified me. I think that people who see me and think of me in terms of this role usually, as they're talking to me, will also say, 'Oh but I also liked you in this or that.' So I think it's better to be identified with one role and then jog someone's memory into remembering another role, than it is to see a celebrity or an actor coming at you down the street and saying, 'Oh, there's um...he was in..." [There's that] empty feeling that the actor has about not really being remembered for anything except for being a face on the screen somewhere, so I prefer this."

Perkins claimed that Norman was not only his most famous role: "I think it's my favorite role as well. So many thousands of people have come up to me on the street and in hotel lobbies and in department stores and have shared their experiences of seeing the films with me. It's always been with the greatest amount of pleasure that they've done so. They've told me stories about the dates they had with their future wives, and they've told me stories about sneaking out of the bathroom window and seeing it against their parents orders -- and many stories like that, which have imprinted it into their minds. Always with a feeling of having been entertained and having been taken in by the story and having a good time. Of course, I enjoy that." While the recognition was gratifying for Perkins, it did have an effect on this rest of his career. "After Alfred Hitchcock, I became a 'psycho' for the rest of my life. Whenever I go into the store, or drive into a gas station, or walk on the streets, or go into a restaurant, I hear people saying, 'Look, there's Norman Bates'." Alfred Hitchcock himself said, "Anthony Perkins was marvelous, so perfect in the part that it may have damaged his career, and I may have done him harm."

For the rest of his career, Perkins could never shake Norman Bates. While he appeared in several other films, such as Goodbye Again (1961) – for which he won a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival; Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial (1962), Is Paris Burning? (1966), and Catch-22 (1970), he had established himself as a character actor rather than a leading man. During the 1970s, his film appearances were mostly in offbeat, independent features such as Remember My Name (1978) and Winter Kills (1979), but he did show up in a few co-starring roles in big-budget features such as The Black Hole (1979), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Mahogany (1975). In the mid-1980s, after Hitchcock's death, Perkins returned to the Bates Motel in three Psycho sequels, including Psycho III which Perkins also directed, but none of these were as successful as the original.

Throughout his career, Perkins had often returned to the stage to act (Look Homeward Angel, Greenwillow, for which he was nominated for a Tony award in 1960), and direct (Star-Spangled Girl (1967), Steambath (1970), The Wager, 1974). He also co-wrote the film The Last of Sheila with Steven Sondheim. The film, starring Raquel Welch, James Mason, James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, and Richard Benjamin, won Perkins and Sondheim an Edgar Allan Poe Award for the screenplay in 1974.

Perkins underwent psychotherapy in order to overcome his fear of women and become a heterosexual in the late 1960s. After a relationship with actress Victoria Principal, he met and married Berry Berenson , a fashion photographer who was the granddaughter of designer Schiaparelli and the sister of actress Marisa Berenson, in 1973. They had two sons, Osgood, an actor (named for Perkins' father), and Elvis, a musician. In the early 1990s, Perkins learned that he had the AIDS virus. During his life, he chose not to make the news public (he had purportedly discovered he had the disease from the tabloids), but in his private life he and his wife were both involved with AIDS charities in Los Angeles. Anthony Perkins died of complications from AIDS on September 12, 1992. At his death, he released a statement which read, ""There are many who believe this disease is God's vengeance. But I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS, than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES: The A-Z of Hitchcock: The Ultimate Reference Guide by Howard Maxford
It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler
Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History But Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis
Changing Course: Healing from Loss, Abandonment and Fear by Claudia A. Black
www.movies.yahoo.com
The Internet Movie Database
Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins by Charles Winecoff
Psycho Star Anthony Perkins by Steve Biodrowski