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Anthony Perkins

Anthony Perkins brought a rare combination of sensitivity, unease and nervous intelligence to the screen. Born in Manhattan on April 4, 1932, he was the son of actor Osgood Perkins and found an early route into performance through summer stock theatre. His film debut came in George Cukor’s The Actress in 1953, but Broadway helped establish him first: replacing John Kerr in Tea and Sympathy brought wider attention and revealed how naturally he could inhabit vulnerable, complicated young men. Hollywood soon put that quality to work. As Josh Birdwell in William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion, Perkins earned a Golden Globe for Best New Actor and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Paramount then positioned him as a leading man in films including Fear Strikes Out, The Tin Star and The Matchmaker, while he continued returning to the stage. His performance in Look Homeward, Angel earned a Tony nomination. Then came Norman Bates. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho cast Perkins against his wholesome leading-man image while drawing on the watchfulness and nervous energy already present in his work. The performance brought him international recognition and became the role most closely tied to his career. Yet Perkins spent years testing the limits of that association. He relocated to France, won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor for Goodbye Again and worked with filmmakers including Orson Welles on The Trial and Claude Chabrol on The Champagne Murders. His later career moved between major ensembles, intimate dramas, stage work and horror. He appeared in Catch-22, Play It as It Lays, Murder on the Orient Express and Mahogany, and returned to Norman Bates in three Psycho sequels. Psycho III also marked his feature directing debut; he later directed Lucky Stiff. Perkins’s interests extended beyond acting. With Stephen Sondheim, he co-wrote the mystery screenplay The Last of Sheila, which received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. Across acting, writing and directing, his career kept circling characters whose charm never fully settled the question of what was happening underneath. He died in 1992.